Books

Man Seeks God

Man Seeks God came about after a health scare landed me in the hospital. I was in pain, awaiting a diagnosis, when a well-meaning nurse asks me a simple, blunt question: “Have you found your God yet?”  This out-of-the-blue query nags, prods, and ultimately launches me on a far-flung journey to do just that.  And so I am off, searching the globe for a faith that fits.

For most of my life, I have been a “spiritual voyeur,” privy to a wide range of religious practices, but never seriously considered these concepts in my own life. I was an agnostic by default. Face to face with my own mortality, though, and spurred on by the question of what spiritual principles to impart to my young daughter, I decide to correct this omission, undertaking a worldwide exploration of religions and hoping to come to a personal understanding of the divine. In other words, I wanted to answer the nurse’s question. Read more…

The Geography of Bliss

The Geography of Bliss is a tough book to nail down. It defies categorization. I like to think of it as a philosophical humorous travel memoir. It is all of those things, and more.

For years, as a foreign correspondent for National Public Radio, I covered a multitude of catastrophes, natural and man-made. But for The Geography of Bliss, I 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 my guide, I travel the world in search of the happiest places and what we can learn from them.  As I make my 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), I  calls upon the collective wisdom of “the self-help industrial complex” to help him navigate the path to contentment. Read more…