The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, by Alain de Botton

At first, I loved this book.  The first couple of chapters brought to mind Leonard Read's classic essay, "I, Pencil."  If you haven't read this before, click here and read it now!  That great little story tells of the incredible complexity of the common pencil, created by the efforts of millions of people all over the world, not one of whom knows how to make a pencil.  In a similar way, Alain de Botton looks at some of the ordinary, everyday transactions of our daily economic lives and reveals the complex mechanisms behind them.

De Botton, a Swiss-born, London-based writer, starts at the port of London, where he catalogues some of the activity there.  Raw materials come from all over the world to be made into finished products.  Finished products come from all over the world to be distributed to consumers.  The ships arrive from exotic ports of call, but to the shipping agents, "their vessels' journeys have all the mundanity of a ride between stations on a Underground line."  The consumer is typically indifferent to the origins and travels of the goods he buys, but "a slight dampness at the bottom of a carton, or an obscure code printed along a computer cable, may hint at processes of manufacture and transport noble and more mysterious, more worthy of wonder and study, than the goods themselves."

De Botton describes the intricate workings at a logistics park, where much of the work takes place at night. "We lie in bed, . . . our mouths defencelessly agape, while a fleet of lorries is loaded up with the lion's share of the morning's semi-skimmed milk for northern England."  Other warehouses are full of produce, where "at any given moment, half the contents of the warehouse are seventy-two hours away from being inedible, a prospect which prompts continuous struggles against the challenges of mould and geography."  So tomatoes from Palermo end up on a table in northern Scotland in mere days, and strawberries from California are flown across the Arctic Circle to European grocery stores.  Because of the short lives of strawberries, "An improbable number of grown-ups have been forced to subordinate their sloth, to move pallets across sheds and wait in rumbling diesel lorries in traffic to bow to the exacting demands of soft plump fruit."

For me, a favorite feature is the photo essay which follows some tuna from the Maldives to a dinner table.  The author goes along with a commercial fishing crew, watches as they bring in their catch, to the processing plant, rides the plane with it to London, stalks the shoppers in the store, and follows the purchaser home to dinner.  (The photo essay is available at the photographer's web site, richardbaker.photoshelter.com.) In another chapter, he visits a biscuit (cookie) factory, examining the marketing research and recipe experimentation that goes into producing a package of cookies.  The massive research and production effort for one little cookie is astounding.  Next time you have dinner, eat an Oreo, or buy some random product at the store, these chapters will make you stop and think about all that went into getting those items into your shopping cart.

Those chapters, which constitute about 1/3 of the book, fell into the "I love this book!" category.  De Botton's style makes what may seem mundane into fascinating reading.  The rest of the book is not bad, but didn't grab me the way the first part did.  While looking into various trades and professions, he brings them alive and provides some interesting insights for the outsider.  The Japanese team who travels to French Guiana to launch a satellite for their TV network, the painter who paints the same tree over and over again, the entrepreneurs who go to a conference to learn "How to Turn That Gem of an Idea Into Shed-Loads of Money," all point to the many ways people contribute to the life of work.  The sorrows?  Every now and then I sensed from de Bottom a bit of futility and meaninglessness in the working life, but overall, at least in my interpretation, he dwells more on the satisfaction and joy of a job done well.

Uneven though the latter part of The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work may be, I thoroughly enjoyed de Botton's style.  He has helped shine a light on the world of consumer goods and of production and labor as a whole.  As I look around the room now, and as I think about the variety, complexity, and technology of the goods and services to available to me, our world seems smaller and more interconnected.