The Geography of BlissOne Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World

Pursuing the secret to happiness across the planet
As a foreign correspondent for National Public Radio, Eric Weiner covered mostly depressing places and stories — bubonic plague in India, the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein's Iraq. After all, as he confesses, misery makes for riveting radio. Listeners demand hard news, which usually entails body counts, poverty, famine or disease. But even a hardened journalist like Weiner still yearned to explore the flip side of misery. The result is the Geography of Bliss, in which Weiner travels the globe in search of the secret to happiness.

Weiner's journeys take him from the Netherlands (home of the World Database of Happiness, where scientists track happiness statistics) to places as far-flung as Switzerland, Bhutan, Qatar, Iceland, Moldova, Thailand, Britain and India, as well as the United States. Along the way, he discovers confounding and counterintuitive happiness data, such as the fact that rich and poor nations wallow in equal misery (Qatar and Moldova, respectively), and drastically different societal freedoms resulting in strikingly similar high happiness ratings (free-wheeling Netherlands vs. uptight Switzerland). In the end, these contradictions turn out to be precisely the point: there is no secret to happiness, because all happy nations find happiness in unique ways.

Narrated with the polish one expects from NPR correspondents, the recording is as riveting and moving as any hard news — and a whole lot more uplifting.