The Geography of Bliss - Eric Weiner

[goodreads]

Title: The Geography of Bliss
Author: Eric Weiner
Genre: Memoir
Rating: 3.5/5
# pages: 345
Date read: July, 2011

The Geography of Bliss takes the reader 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.


Part happiness project, part travel memoir. I really liked reading about Eric's experiences and have to agree with him that Tolstoy got it all wrong - people are happy for all kinds of different reasons, and what works for some won't necessarily work for others. It's an incredibly quotable book, and I've jotted down a number of quotes in my little notebook :)

I liked that he limited himself to 10 countries, and then spent quite a lot of both physical time and page time on each, so the reader got the impression that he'd really done his research and gotten a true picture of the country.