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Article: Status obsessed.(Alain de Botton's new book, Status Anxiety)
- Article from:
- WWD
- Article date:
- June 29, 2004
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 Conde Nast Publications, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Byline: Marshall Heyman
NEW YORK -- Sitting in a hotel lobby on Central Park South, Alain de Botton has just gotten off the Queen Mary II, where he was invited as "the entertainment." Part of an Oxford University program, he was asked to give lectures on the topics he's covered in his books: philosophy, travel, Proust and, now, wealth and power, which he chronicles in his latest meditation on contemporary life, "Status Anxiety" (Pantheon).
"They responded better than I thought," the British author insists. "If you're going on the Queen Mary, you're not going to be thinking about status. You are status." As expected, de Botton found his theories of ...