Word: weiners
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Often the simplest questions have the most interesting answers. A few winters back, I was sitting over a cup of instant hot chocolate in Reykjavík, Iceland, with a fellow American, Eric Weiner. He was in town researching a book about happiness, trying to get to the bottom of why Icelanders consistently say they are content in a country they have nicknamed the "Ice Cube." I happened to live on the Ice Cube at the time, but I was taken aback when Weiner asked me, point blank, "Are you happy here...
...wondered - Does where you live determine how happy you are? - and uses it to plumb the psyches of nations that are statistically the happiest places on earth: countries such as Iceland, Qatar and Switzerland that "possess, in spades ... money, pleasure, spirituality, family, and chocolate." In a year of traveling, Weiner visited not only well-adjusted locales, but also places where people say life is just so-so and one where the people are truly miserable, all the while asking himself and the reader: If you lived here, "would you be happy then...
...Weiner says his own disposition is akin to that of his favorite Winnie the Pooh character, Eeyore the despondent donkey. That - along with the fact that he has worked as a journalist in more than 30 countries and for a decade was a correspondent for U.S. nonprofit radio-news syndicator NPR - means he takes a skeptical and fact-based approach. The first place he lands is the World Database of Happiness (WDH), a Dutch institute that scientifically researches perceptions of happiness in various societies around the world, and ranks countries in order of contentment. At WDH, Weiner learns some...
...begins to acknowledge what he and all of us were aware of from the start: there is no single road to happiness. Heavy drinking, for instance, seems a benign diversion in Iceland but has ground Moldova to a depressed halt. The Swiss consistently say they are happy, but Weiner finds the country well run and well behaved to the point that two dogs he observes in a park one afternoon are "not on leashes but don't attempt to run off. They are Swiss dogs...
...book's absence of a singular, cohesive revelation won't stop you from enjoying its vignettes of Indian traffic or the cozy London pub, however. Weiner's travel writing delivers nourishing moments of humor and lucidity. (Travel, he reminds us, comes from the French word travail, or work, a thing that was for centuries relegated to unlucky pilgrims, nomads and soldiers who were forced to wander.) Sardonic observation is his particular gift. In the capital of Moldova - among the least happy places in the world according to the WDH - he walks past a couple of cops who "like all Moldovan...