Book of the Month: The Geography of Bliss, by Eric Weiner

The first time I visited Thailand, the quality that impressed me most was not the temples or the pad thai or the palm-fringed beaches, it was the smiles. As I traveled around the country, I came to understand that in Thailand (as in many places) smiles don't always equal happiness, but at the same time, I came away with the feeling that on balance, the often-smiling Thais are among the happiest people on earth, and that this is one of the prime reasons why visiting Thailand is such bliss.

Eric Weiner comes to the same conclusion in his winning new book, The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World. Leaving behind a career as a foreign correspondent for National Public Radio, Weiner embarks on a year-long search to find the happiest country on earth. He starts his journey in the Netherlands, home to the World Database of Happiness, whose humorless statistics point him in the direction of nine more countries, wonderfully ranging from Iceland to India, Qatar to Bhutan. (The other countries are Switzerland, the U.K., the U.S., Thailand, and Moldova—the last, for contrast purposes, being the unhappiest place on the planet at the time of writing.)

With happiness as filter and focus, Weiner paints incisive portraits of each place he visits. He is especially profound on Bhutan, whose official policy of Gross National Happiness seems to cultivate, or mirror—or both—an admirable attitude he encounters around the country. He is also transporting on Thailand and on India, whose seemingly effortless embrace of extremes both confuses and awes him, as it does me.

Weiner is a perceptive traveler, and he enlivens and deepens his narrative quest by seeking out knowledgeable locals and expats wherever he goes, allowing him to create an illuminating anecdotal topo map of each country's psychographic landscape.

I finished The Geography of Bliss feeling like I had just taken a whirlwind tour of the world with an engaging and well-informed guide, utilizing an important and too often overlooked compass: happiness.

As I was reading this book, I was also undergoing a life transformation of my own: My dad was taken critically ill, and was on a journey to a swift and blessedly pain-free death. This put the big questions underpinning the book—What is happiness? What is the meaning of life?—in a new and urgent perspective, and I found myself thinking that, in the end, happiness may well be the most telling measure of a country and of a person.

But finally I concluded—as Weiner intimates near the end of his moving journey—that one quality trumps even happiness: love. Give me the country that inculcates and embodies love—as my dad did in his life—and I'll show you the truly happiest place on Earth.