taken from Goodreads:
"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 Singapore benefit psychologically by having their options limited by the government? 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."
I enjoy travelogues, if for no other reason than there are usually the closest I will ever get to visiting most foreign locations. Weiner's premise -- his search for happiness as a place -- provides an interesting structure and organizing theme to the book, but his conclusions, in the end, are what you would've expected them to be. There's nothing really new in what he discovers; much of the travelogue comes off more as a personal mission with the emphasis being on Weiner's own personal search for happiness, and there's nothing he discovers along the way that really seems to have much effect on him. I couldn't really decide if I liked that he had made this entire study more personal, or if I would've preferred for him to keep his own personal life out of it. There were times when I vacillated between the two. In the end, though, I felt like there needed to be something more, to justify how much of Weiner's personal life had made it into the book. The structure of each chapter, each visit to a new country, became pretty cut-and-dried after a while, so it was only the fact that some of these places were places I had never heard of before that kept me reading, rather than anything about Weiner's style or prose.
