The Geography of Bliss

One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World

by Eric Weiner

Hardcover, 352 pages

English language

Published Jan. 3, 2008 by Twelve.

(11 reviews)

Part foreign affairs discourse, part humor, and part twisted self-help guide, 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.

4 editions

AliCorbin reviewed The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner

Review of 'The Geography of Bliss' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

A pleasant book, mildly humorous, not very deep. Maybe it could have been a bit shorter. It was basically a travel book, built on an unusual premise. The first discussion was on the depressed level of happiness in these uncertain economic times. But then, we don't know this - we only suppose it. We went from the nature of happiness to the joy of travel, comparing notes on countries that we had been to and that Weiner had written about.