The Architecture of Happiness

Why Architecture Matters

• UNABRIDGED (6 hrs and 5 mins)
• By Paul Goldberger
• Narrated By Michael Prichard
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

The purpose of Why Architecture Matters is to "come to grips with how things feel to us when we stand before them, with how architecture affects us emotionally as well as intellectually" - with its impact on our lives. "Architecture begins to matter," writes Paul Goldberger, "when it brings delight and sadness and perplexity and awe along with a roof over our heads."

On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change

• UNABRIDGED (16 hrs and 26 mins)
• By Ada Louise Huxtable
• Narrated By T. David Rutherford

For more than half a century, Ada Louise Huxtable's keen eye and vivid writing have reinforced to readers how important architecture is and why it continues to be both controversial and fascinating - making her one of the best-known critics in the world. On Architecture collects the best of Huxtable's writing from the New York Times, New York Review of Books, Wall Street Journal, and her various books. In these selections, Huxtable examines the 20th century's most important architectural masters and projects.

How to Think More About Sex: The School of Life

• UNABRIDGED (3 hrs and 21 mins)
• By Alain de Botton
• Narrated By David Thorpe

We don't think too much about sex; we're merely thinking about it in the wrong way.

So asserts Alain de Botton in this rigorous and supremely honest book designed to help us navigate the intimate and exciting - yet often confusing and difficult - experience that is sex. Few of us tend to feel we're entirely normal when it comes to sex, and what we’re supposed to be feeling rarely matches up with the reality. This audiobook argues that 21st-century sex is ultimately fated to be a balancing act between love and desire, and adventure and commitment.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities: 50th Anniversary Edition

• UNABRIDGED (18 hrs and 5 mins)
• By Jane Jacobs, Jason Epstein (introduction)
• Narrated By Donna Rawlins

Thirty years after its publication, The Death and Life of Great American Cities was described by The New York Times as "perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning....[It] can also be seen in a much larger context. It is first of all a work of literature; the descriptions of street life as a kind of ballet and the bitingly satiric account of traditional planning theory can still be read for pleasure even by those who long ago absorbed and appropriated the book's arguments."

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

• UNABRIDGED (6 hrs and 32 mins)
• By Alain De Botton
• Narrated By David Colacci

We spend most of our waking lives at work - in occupations often chosen by our unthinking younger selves. And yet we rarely ask ourselves how we got there or what our occupations mean to us. Characteristically lucid, clever, and inventive, de Botton's "song for occupations" is a celebration and exploration of an aspect of life that is all too often ignored and a book that shines a revealing light on the essential meaning of work in our lives.