Author(s): Eric Weiner

Fiction

In the last two decades, psychologists and economists have learned a lot about happiness, including who's happy and who isn't. The Dutch are, the Romanians aren't, and Americans are somewhere in between...After years of going to the world's least happy countries and seeking out the least happy people, Eric Weiner, a veteran foreign correspondent, decided to travel to some of the world's most contented places. He travels to Switzerland, where he discovers the hidden virtues of boredom (and how proportiional representation could be the answer...). He discovers the relationship between money and happiness in tiny and extremely wealthy Qatar (and it's not a good one).He goes to Thailand, and finds that not thinking is a way of life. He goes to the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, and discovers that they have an official policy of Gross National Happiness! He asks himself why the British don't do happiness? In Weiner's quest to find the world's happiest places, he eats rotten Icelandic shark, meditates in Bangalore, visits strip clubs in Bangkok and drinks himself into a stupor in Reykjavik.