Eric Weiner on KosmoShow 1×07!
On Thursday December 10th Eric Weiner will join us on KosmoShow.
How to watch the show:
- Attend live here: InfoQultura - Plac Konstytucji 4, Warsaw, Poland
- Livestream will be available here: http://kosmoshow.com/live
Check the video questions already asked:
About the book:
Eric Weiner’s The Geography of Bliss signals the arrival of the next great category of literary nonfiction: the philosophical self-help humorous travel memoir.
Weiner, a veteran foreign correspondent for National Public Radio, has covered a multitude of catastrophes and maladies from more than 30 countries over the past two decades. For The Geography of Bliss, however, he decided to tell the other side of the story by visiting some of the world’s most contented places.
Using the ancient philosophers and the much more recent “science of happiness” as his guide, Weiner travels the world in search of the happiest places. Many authors have attempted to describe what happiness is; fewer have shown us where it is, and what we can learn from the inhabitants of different cultures.
As Weiner makes his way from Iceland (one of the world’s happiest countries) to Bhutan (where the king has made Gross National Happiness a national priority) to Moldova (not a happy place), he calls upon the collective wisdom of “the self-help industrial complex” to help him navigate the path to contentment.
He travels to Switzerland, where he discovers the hidden virtues of boredom; to the tiny-and extremely wealthy-Persian Gulf nation of Qatar, where the relationship between money and happiness is laid bare; to India, where Westerners seek their bliss at the feet of gurus; to Thailand, where not thinking is a way of life; to a small town outside London where happiness experts attempt to “change the psychological climate.” He also travels within the U.S.-and discovers that paradise is always a step away.
Throughout his global quest, Weiner integrates the insights of classical thinkers on happiness, augmented by one-liners worthy of a stand-up comedian. This is travel writing that simultaneously journeys across the globe and through the author’s mind.
Weiner is no dispassionate observer. In his quest for the world’s happiest places, he eats rotten Icelandic shark, smokes Moroccan hashish and intervenes to save an insect in distress. Almost. Full of inspired moments and earned epiphanies, The Geography of Bliss sets out to accomplish a feat few books dare and even fewer achieve: to make you happier.
About the author:
FOR as long as he can remember Eric Weiner wanted to be a foreign correspondent. So he could hardly believe his good fortune when, one day in 1993, NPR dispatched him to India as the network’s first full-time correspondent in that country. Weiner spent two of the best years of his life based in New Delhi, covering everything from an outbreak of bubonic plague to India’s economic reforms, before moving on to other postings in Jerusalem and Tokyo.
Over the past decade, he’s reported from more than 30 countries, most of them profoundly unhappy. He traveled to Iraq several times during the reign of Saddam Hussein. He was in Afghanistan in 2001, when the Taliban regime fell.
He’s also served as a correspondent for NPR in New York, Miami and Washington, D.C. Weiner is a former reporter for The New York Times and was a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. He was part of a team of NPR reporters that won a 1994 Peabody award for a series of investigative reports about the U.S. tobacco industry.
His commentary has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Slate and The New Republic, among other publications. After traveling the world, he has settled, quasi-happily, in the Washington area, where he divides his time between his living room and his kitchen. He lives with his wife and daughter and their chronically overweight cat. He (Eric, not the cat) is an unrepentant sushi lover. Tekka maki, in particular.
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