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Description

Many authors have attempted to describe what happiness is: fewer have shown us where it is, why some places seem to be happier than others, and how changing your location can change your mood. Eric Weiner, a self-described mope, is a longtime foreign correspondent for National Public Radio. Over the past two decades, he has covered a multitude of catastrophes and maladies from more than thirty countries. In THE GEOGRAPHY OF BLISS, however, he decided to tell the other side of the story. Using as his guide the emerging field of positive psychology, he visits some of the world's most contented places: -India, where happiness and misery live side-by-side -Bhutan, where the king has made Gross National Happiness a national priority -Switzerland, where residents believe envy is the great enemy of happiness -Iceland, which, despite being cold, remote, and full of failure, is among the world's happiest places - and for good reason, the author finds. Throughout his global quest, Weiner calls upon the collective wisdom of "the self-help industrial complex" to help him navigate the path to bliss: the philosophers, writers, and seekers whose insigts serve as a road map on Weiner's hilarious head trip. Rarely has travel writing been able to make the author's interior psychological journey as wise and entertaining as the exterior one. THE GEOGRAPHY OF BLISS is full of inspired moments and earned epiphanies. It accomplishes a feat few books dare and even fewer achieve. It will make you happier.