Description

Any Baedeker will tell us where we must travel, but just Alain de Botton will tell us how and why. Using the same insouciant elegance and intellect he delivered to How Proust Can Save Your Valuable Life, de Botton views the joys of expectation; the appeal of the exotic, and the worthiness of realizing from a seascape in Barbados for the takeoffs at Heathrow. Even while de Botton takes the audience along by himself peregrinations, he also cites such known fellow-tourists as Baudelaire, Wordsworth, Van Gogh, the biologist Alexander von Humboldt, and the 18th-century odd Xavier de Maistre, who catalogued the miracles of his room. The-Art of Travel is just a smart and totally unique book.