Alain de Botton's new book, Status Anxiety, intends to advise readers on how to identify sources of malaise and dissatisfaction and, once identified, how to cope with those feelings.

This is, then, another entry into a large and crowded, field: that of Self Improvement, Self Help or Edification. We look to such books for insight and solace, uplift and reformation. If you are old enough, the names of Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale will ring with familiar advice; if younger, you have perhaps turned to Lee Iacocca or Donald Trump for counsel on adjusting yourself to the demands of predatory capitalism.

Less inflammatory purveyors of this sort of thing are Anthony Robbins (Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Life), and Stephen R. Covey (Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change).

Within this field, it is Alain de Botton's particular talent to recycle for middle-brow consumption a bland, watered-down dish concocted of tidbits and morsels snipped off the juicier cuts of "classic literature" which are then boiled down in his own colorless, odorless and tasteless broth of prose.

The result is a book of staggering obviousness that panders to the faux intellectual while condescending to the intelligent reader who may not be familiar with all the authors de Botton shamelessly trivializes here but who will nonetheless recognize that he is being sold a wiener gussied up as T-bone steak.

De Botton has done this sort of book before to somewhat better effect. In both How Proust Can Change Your Life and The Consolations of Philosophy, de Botton employed much the same cut-and-paste techniques as he does in this new book, but managed to provide a light touch and modest humor that kept the books from sinking like stones in their own pools of shallow thinking and muddy reference.

It is difficult to imagine any serious reader spending more than five minutes with these pages without either falling asleep or going off in search of a paper shredder. Just how stale, flat and unprofitable de Botton can be is apparent from the beginning of the book.

Consider this bloated passage of monumental triteness: "The predominate impulse behind our desire to rise in the social hierarchy may be rooted not so much in the material goods we can accrue or the power we can wield as in the amount of love we stand to receive as a consequence of high status. Money, fame and influence may be valued more as tokens of - and means to - love rather than ends in themselves."

It gets worse. Only two pages later, we find "Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgments of those we live among. If they are amused by our jokes, we grow confident in our power to amuse. If they praise us, we develop an impression of high merit. And if they avoid our gaze when we enter a room or look impatient after we tell our occupation, we may fall into feelings of self-doubt and worthlessness."

De Botton, who is apparently an educated man and a university-trained philosopher, must have missed the lesson explaining the differences between simple and simple-minded - and don't even get me started on de Botton's use of the writings of William James, David Hume, Rousseau, Marx, Emerson, Thackery and dozens of others. With all of these writers, de Botton proves how adept he is at turning silk purses of wisdom into sows ears of flannel-mouthed platitude and cliché.

My mother, whose education consisted primarily of raising five children pretty much on her own, has a stock of a couple dozen or so homilies and folk sayings, undoubtedly handed down to her from her mother and so on, that render the 300 pages of this book unnecessary.

And even the bitterest of her stories often came with a cookie and a glass of milk.

It is, I suspect, pointless to trouble you further with this book's many faults. If it has any merits, I am unable to discern them.

I am not, admittedly, a fan of the literature of edification in general, but I imagine that even such ephemeral and slight volumes as the D'oh of Homer Simpson or the Tao of Pooh offer much the same advice as de Botton but with a more fitting modesty and humor.

My own advice is quite simple: Call your mother.

Duane Davis is a freelance writer living in Littleton.