Laugh. Think. Repeat. Repeatedly. If someone told me this book was this good, I wouldn't have believed them. --Po Bronson, author of What Should I Do With My Life? Think Don Quixote with a dark sense of humor and a taste for hashish and you begin to grasp Eric Weiner, the modern knight-errant of this mad, sad, wise, and witty quest across four continents. I won't spoil the fun by telling if his mission succeeds, except to say that happiness is reading a book as entertaining as this. --Tony Horwitz, author of Confederates ...
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Laugh. Think. Repeat. Repeatedly. If someone told me this book was this good, I wouldn't have believed them. --Po Bronson, author of What Should I Do With My Life? Think Don Quixote with a dark sense of humor and a taste for hashish and you begin to grasp Eric Weiner, the modern knight-errant of this mad, sad, wise, and witty quest across four continents. I won't spoil the fun by telling if his mission succeeds, except to say that happiness is reading a book as entertaining as this. --Tony Horwitz, author of Confederates in the Attic Part foreign affairs discourse, part humor, and part twisted self-help guide, The Geography of Bliss takes the listener from America to Iceland to India in search of happiness, or, in the crabby author's case, moments of un-unhappiness. The book uses a beguiling mixture of travel, psychology, science and humor to investigate not what happiness is, but where it is. Are people in Switzerland happier because it is the most democratic country in the world? Do citizens of Qatar, awash in petrodollars, find joy in all that cash? Is the King of Bhutan a visionary for his initiative to calculate Gross National Happiness? Why is Asheville, North Carolina so damn happy? With engaging wit and surprising insights, Eric Weiner answers those questions and many others, offering travelers of all moods some interesting new ideas for sunnier destinations and dispositions.
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So...I hate to be the guy that writes the only bad review-but really, I don't know how you could find the read to be fascinating. He doesnt really dive deep...It is more of a study conducted as a term paper than a real read. I found myself reading...and reading...kept reading, really I wanted to like the book, but a couple of hundred pages in, I asked myself, what the hell have I gained from this? The humor was very basic, didn't even crack a grin ;). Maybe you will like it, I couldnt bring myself to read the last 30 pages even for the sense of accomplishment of finishing another book.
slumdog1
Aug 20, 2009
Easy reading
Very well written; entertaining; educational and a book you can easily pickup (but hard to put down).
Rubycanary
Mar 19, 2009
Enjoy this with a good cup fo coffee.
The NPR correspondent goes around the world, travelling to the places considered the happiest to discover their collective secrets. We often relate our happiness to our geography, and he seeks to find out if this has any truth to it. "With our words, we subconsciously conflate geography and happiness. We speak of searching for happiness, of finding contentment, as if these were locations in an atlas, actual places that we could visit if only we had the proper map and the right navigational skills. Anyone who has taken a vacation to, say, some Caribbean island and had flash through their mind the uninvited thought, 'I could be happy here' knows what I mean."
He travels to the Netherlands where happiness is being researched scientifically, to Switzerland where shear boredom and cleanliness seems to be the answer to the world's purported happiest people, to Bhutan where happiness is a government goal and mandate. In Qatar he finds folks who think money can buy anything, including happiness, to Iceland - the happiness of failure, and in Thailand where happiness is just plain not thinking about it. In Moldova he finds the concept that happiness is always somewhere else, and in the US where it is in the place you consider home.
I laughed outloud three times while reading just the opening page. Weiner's descriptions are so good, I was brought back to the places I've been, and felt a huge since of desire for the places I haven't seen yet. Except for Moldova. Moldova is the one place he visited that isn't happy. They are described as the unhappiest people in the world. Their reasoning is that they don't have enough money. But as Weiner viewed in Bhutan, money isn't as important as a strong sense of culture and belonging. 90% of Bhutanese that have a chance to study in the US or Britain return to their home country, even though there is virtually no economy there. (To which an American tourist commented, "well, why would they do that.") The real reason Weiner encounters for unhappiness is a lack of trust and true friendships, two qualities that are belittled as weakness in Moldova.
Overall, I just found this to be an intensely enjoyable book.
