Quicklet on Eric Weiner's The Geography of Bliss


Book Description

Have you ever walked through a park on a sunny spring day when everyone looks like they're having a great time and thought, gee, I wish I were that happy? Have you ever perused Facebook and seen a group of friends beaming into the camera and wished that your life could be as good as theirs? Have you ever felt like your life would be so much better if only you had more money? Or a boyfriend? Or a new car? Or a PhD? Or simply a nice cold beer? Well, my friend, you are not alone. Ever since Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that man has the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" (and we'll pretend that he didn't just mean rich white men), the American people have made it their mission to find happiness. And we aren't alone, either. Even if it isn't written down in one of their country's most important historical documents, people from pretty much every nation in the world is looking for that magic combination that will make them happy. But what is the perfect recipe for happiness? And how do we define happiness to begin with?




The Geography of Bliss


Book Description

What makes a nation happy? Is one country's sense of happiness the same as another's? In the last two decades, psychologists and economists have learned a lot about 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, Eric Weiner, a veteran foreign correspondent, decided to travel and evaluate each country's different sense of happiness and discover the nation that seemed happiest of all. ·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 contented way of life. ·He goes to the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, and discovers 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. Full of inspired moments, The Geography of Bliss accomplishes a feat few travel books dare and even fewer achieve: to make you happier.




Cognitive Psychology


Book Description

This is world famous book. One of the top sellers in the field, Cognitive Psychology is well-written, humorous and remains the most comprehensive and balanced text in the area of undergraduate cognition. The text features a sequential model of human cognition from sensation to perception, to attention, to memory, to higher-order cognition and features new cutting-edge coverage of consciousness, cognitive neuroscience, memory and forgetting and evolutionary psychology.




You Never Call! You Never Write!


Book Description

Continually revised and reinvented, the Jewish Mother archetype becomes in Antler's expert hands a unique lens with which to examine vital concerns of American Jews and the culture at large.




A Vast Conspiracy


Book Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The inspiration for Impeachment: American Crime Story on FX The definitive account of the Clinton-Lewinsky sex scandals, the extraordinary ordeal that nearly brought down a president—with a new preface by the author that reframes the events in light of the Me Too movement “A story as taut and surprising as any thriller . . . [an] unimpeachable page-turner.”—People First published a year after the infamous impeachment trial, this propulsive narrative captures the full arc of the Clinton sex scandals—from their beginnings in a Little Rock hotel to their culmination on the floor of the United States Senate with only the second vote on presidential removal in American history. Rich in character and fueled with the high octane of a sensational legal thriller, A Vast Conspiracy has indelibly shaped our understanding of this disastrous moment in American political history.




Flatland


Book Description

'Flatland' is a conceptual, graphic-based rewriting of E.A. Abbott's sci-fi classic: a fictional guide to concept of multiple dimensions of reading which will appeal to those interested in design and architecture as well as unusual writing and poetry.




The Inkblot Record


Book Description

Dan Farrell's second volume of poetry is an examination of a discourse that everyone knows about but few people have examined in detail: the response of people to Rorschach inkblot patterns. By turns profound and hilarious, this book is an insightful statement about the relentless drive to make meaning out of nothing. The online version features a dynamic inkblot, designed by Brian Kim Stefans, to test your own poetic/psychological state of being.




Adjunct


Book Description




Getting Inside Jack Kerouac's Head


Book Description

'Retyping On the Road is not only a remarkable performance – of endurance, concentration, and apprenticeship – it is also a deadpan experiment in textual literary criticism. Kerouac's original typescript was oriented toward the writer. Morris' practice collapses reader and writer, reorienting Kerouac's typescript to the digital, discontinuous unit of the published codex page. In doing so, Morris both inverts Kerouac's style of production – pecking slowly and methodically where his predecessor sped along at a reputed one-hundred-words-per-benzedrine-fuelled-minute – and he simultaneously fulfils its legend. A constrained and unexpressive homage to the era that heralded unconstrained and improvisatory expressionism, Getting Inside Jack Kerouac's Head showcases the critical power of the extended techniques of conceptually rigorous 'uncreative writing.' In the process it reclaims Truman Capote's Parthian shot as a point of pride: 'it isn't writing at all – it's typing.' And type – as Kerouac used the word in On the Road – is all about genre.' (Professor Craig Dworkin, University of Utah)




Summary of Eric Weiner's The Geography of Bliss


Book Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 The world’s greatest philosophers came from Europe, because they spent their time at cafés and let their minds wander until some radically new school of philosophy popped into their heads. I was hunting for happiness. #2 I visit the World Database of Happiness, or WDH, in the morning. It is a secularist’s answer to the Vatican and Mecca and Jerusalem and Lhasa, all rolled into one. #3 I interview Dr. Ruut Veenhoven, a professor of happiness studies, who explains to me that he came of age in the 1960s, when everyone on his college campus was smoking pot and wearing Che Guevara T-shirts. He was interested in healthy minds and happy places. #4 The study of happiness was born out of the contemplation of happiness, which was not new. The ancient Greeks and Romans did a lot of it, as did the Jewish and Catholic faith leaders who came after them. But it was not science.