Status Anxiety

Anyone who''s ever lost sleep over an unreturned phone call or the neighbor''s Lexus had better read Alain de Botton''s irresistibly clear-headed book—immediately. For in its pages, a master explicator of our civilization and its discontents turns his attention to the insatiable quest for status, a quest that has less to do with material comfort than with love.

"Every adult life could be said to be...