The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World Unknown - 2008

From the publisher

Laugh. Think. Repeat. Repeatedly. If someone told me this book was this good, I wouldn't have believed them.
--Po Bronson, author of What Should I Do With My Life? Think Don Quixote with a dark sense of humor and a taste for hashish and you begin to grasp Eric Weiner, the modern knight-errant of this mad, sad, wise, and witty quest across four continents. I won't spoil the fun by telling if his mission succeeds, except to say that happiness is reading a book as entertaining as this.
--Tony Horwitz, author of Confederates in the Attic Part foreign affairs discourse, part humor, and part twisted self-help guide, The Geography of Bliss takes the listener 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.