Rating: 
Summary: How Proust Can Tickle Your Ribs
Review: Ok,I confess to reading the entire bloody 4,300 pages of Remembrance ( in English of course) over the course of seven months. This slim volume filled with lots of spiffy illustrations gave me some relief and carried me onward through the Proustian mire of his masterpiece. The only drawback is I loaned Dick Button's book to two women and one of them read it and will not return it. Oh, faithless Albertine! Oh, sluttish Odette!
Rating:
Summary: A little gem
Review: Delightful read, a fine example of how to carry erudition lightly and convey it with authority and elegance. If you haven't read Proust, this will put you in appetite; if you have, it will help you refine your own insights and amuse you along the way. An impressive achievement.
Rating:
Summary: Superb read
Review: This is a brilliant book. Written with great humour and understated but piercing intelligence, its a really enjoyable work that riffs off Proust with dazzling style. Enjoy this early work from one of Europe's rising literary stars.
Rating:
Summary: A delight
Review: Like a conversation with your most witty, inspired and charming friend, this book is a delight.
Rating:
Summary: A gem of a book
Review: There are few works of literary criticism that have touched me as much as this one. Botton brings a lightness of touch to the deepest ideas, and what shines through is how funny and observant he is. I had never read Proust, and I don't know if I will even now. It's wrong to read this book as some kind of guide to Proust - a dummy's guide. It's far more than that, or rather, it's not really interested in teaching something like for a college class. It feels like a personal, intimate book - where the author, via Proust, discovers some essential things. Buy it.
Rating: 
Summary: A book lover
Review: This book is a very poor attempt by what I have grown to call a "self appointed intellectual". The book totally falls flat of any target.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book - the best books always stir up controversy
Review: Looking at the reviews of this book, you wonder whether people are talking about the same book. Some call it excellent, others a complete load of nonsense. I can see why people might complain. They might say that you need to read Proust and not read a guide on Proust. But that misses out what this book is really about. It's not attempting to be a "guide"; It's certainly not attempting to replace Proust. It's just looking at a certain side of Proust's thought; what one might call his therapeutic side, and tracing it very skillfully through the letters and the biography and the novel. It reads unbelievably clearly - and so, if one's feeling ungenerous, it might be accused of being "simplistic," but that's naive. This kind of clarity and lucidity requires an enormous effort and huge talent. Alain de Botton's work is uneven. The Romantic Movement didn't really work, Kiss & Tell was Ok but only OK, but he triumphed in two books; On Love and now this title. I can only urge serious readers to take a look at this book. This is a book that matters. It's going to go down in history as one of the finest, most intelligent pieces of literary criticism of the 20th century.
Rating: 
Summary: Charming But Slight
Review: This little book is an enjoyable way to pass some time, but is no substitute for the real thing. I just hope a few people who read it do end up eventually tackling Proust's masterpiece.
Rating:
Summary: a collection of smarmy platitudes
Review: It's hard to imagine how Proust can change your life if you don't actually read Proust. Never mind; the author really wants to tell you how Alain de Botton can change your life. If you remember that in the natural course of things change is usually for the worse and that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, you'll probably manage to avoid this collection of smarmy platitudes. Why didn't I? The title intrigued me. (This book deserves one star for its title, however disingenuous.)But how did I come to hear of the title? An acquaintance recommended this author to me. The acquaintance and I are both fans of another author: Milan Kundera. So instead of "Not Proust" I recommend to you in turn the works of Milan Kundera, particularly his, yes, a novel, "The Joke".
Rating:
Summary: Lousy...falls flat.
Review: this book is lousy...don't buy it
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