Status Anxiety (2004)

In his thoughtful, beautifully rendered 1993 novel On Love, de Botton structured the most unwieldy of subjects -- passion and the end of an affair -- as a quasi-academic dissertation. With Anxiety, de Botton takes a similar approach, exploring both humans' eternal doubt of self-worth as well as possible palliative measures through art, philosophy, and religion. De Botton incorporates a vast amount of knowledge into his thesis, but this does ultimately read like a thesis, better suited to a graduate student's syllabus than to an armchair reader.