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Jan 21, 2008

"If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double dahlias in his garden, or looking for dinosaur eggs in the Gobi desert. He will not be searching for happiness as if it were a collar button that has rolled under the radiator. He will not be striving for it as a goal in itself. He will have become aware that he is happy in the course of living life twenty-four crowded hours of the day." --W. Beran Wolfe

The Geography of Bliss

Journalist Eric Weiner deserves points for devising a new way to address the perennial question of what makes people happy and why. The central premise of his odyssey memoir is that the author, a professed grouch ("My last name is pronounced ‘whiner,’ and I do my best to live up to the name"), will travel to the world’s happier places to explore to what degree an individual's happiness is intertwined with a shared geography and culture. To that end, he shoots off to unusual locales — Bhutan, Iceland, Qatar — and to Thailand and India, perpetual stopovers for pleasure seekers, visiting nine foreign countries altogether over the course of a year.