SOURCE: Plate, Liedeke. Review of The Art of Travel, by Alain de Botton. World Literature Today 77, no. 1 (April-June 2003): 111-12.

In the following review, Plate compliments de Botton's “light, humorous prose” in The Art of Travel, but feels that the author's comparisons between art and travel are often “contradictory.”

Prodesse Et Delectare, “to teach and to delight,” could indeed be de Botton's motto. For in The Art of Travel, as in How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997) and The Consolations of Philosophy (2000), he tackles some of life's Big Questions in light, humorous prose, reflecting on the assumptions behind holiday-making, probing our motives and desires for going on a journey, and questioning what we think we do when we travel with the help of a handful of (all-male, mostly French and English nineteenth-century) writers and painters.

The selection of guides to thinking about travel, no less than the topics chosen...