Is this a travel book? Yes, but not a typical one. In my quest for the world’s happiest places, I eat rotten Icelandic shark, smoke Moroccan hashish and intervene to save (almost) an insect in distress. I travel to Switzerland, where I discover the hidden virtues of boredom to the tiny-and extremely wealthy-Persian Gulf nation of Qatar, where the relationship between money and happiness is laid bare to India, where Westerners seek their bliss at the feet of gurus to Thailand, where not thinking is a way of life to a small town outside London where happiness experts attempt to “change the psychological climate.” I am no dispassionate observer. As I make my way from Iceland (one of the world’s happiest countries) to Bhutan (where the king has made Gross National Happiness a national priority) to Moldova (not a happy place), I call upon the collective wisdom of “the self-help industrial complex” to help navigate the path to contentment. Using the ancient philosophers and the much more recent “science of happiness” as my guide, I travel the world in search of the happiest places and what we can learn from them. But for The Geography of Bliss, I decided to tell the other side of the story by visiting some of the world’s most contented places. It is all of those things, and more.įor years, as a foreign correspondent for National Public Radio, I covered a multitude of catastrophes, natural and man-made. I like to think of it as a philosophical humorous travel memoir. The Geography of Bliss is a tough book to nail down.
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