I am slowly working my way through Eric Wiener’s book, The Geography of Bliss, which was a 40th bday pressie. My review so far is mixed. It is sometimes pithy, sometimes funny, but on the whole filtered heavily through the lens of the American eye. take the chapter on Qatar, which I’ve just finished reading, where the author finally gets to interviewing some true Qatari men and proves only that he doesn’t know the first thing about how to talk to Arabs. He basically wound up with no useful insights. Then again, he had been warned of this — if indirectly — by his contact. Still, it ended up being a slightly silly waste of 2 pages and a wasted opportunity because Wiener got straight to the point and didn’t do much to put them at ease. Moreover, given that he spent only a few weeks in each country, it reads more like a series of travel articles rather than a truly interesting foray into happiness.
Parts of the book *do* include some useful insights into how “the other” thinks… but ultimately Weiner let’s us know that his research, and even his desire to do that research, is limited to simplistic journalistic fluff:
I sense a gnawing distance between myself and Qatar. I’m here, but am I really here? I need to think like a Qatari, to get inside the dishdasha, figuratively speaking, if only for a few minutes. But how? I am not about to convert to Islam or take up smoking or drive like a maniac. Walking past the hotel gift shop, it dawns on me. I will buy a pen. Yes, a Ridiculously Expensive Pen.
– Eric Weiner, The Geography of Bliss, p. 130.
And if that is the case, then how can I be sure that Eric is really getting at the substance of the World Happiness Index???