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Incredible!!!
I used it in one long airplane trip and for first time I felt very confortable flying.
Great

Trekking and Climbing in the Western Alps
I ordered this before Christmas and still have not received it.

Falls Flat
I love travelogues, and this whole burgeoning field of "Happiness Studies" seems pretty interesting to me, so I figured I was the perfect audience for this book. Unfortunately, this attempt to get at the essence of happiness via visits to a variety of countries (Holland, Switzerland, Bhutan, Qatar, Iceland, Moldova, Thailand, Great Britain, India, and America) is pretty superficial, and just not that interesting a read. The author's disappointingly limited approach is to take one aspect of a country and use that as the lens for his brief look at its happiness (or lack thereof).

To plan his grand tour, he first visits the Dutch researcher in charge of the "World Database of Happiness", and sifts through the national rankings for most and least happy places in the world. He then bats around the idea that the Dutch are a happy nation due to their relative permissiveness (as evidenced by drug and prostitution laws), which is such a facile idea that I shouldn't have been surprised by the rest of the book. Next it's on to Switzerland, where maybe happiness is the offspring of an orderly society. In Iceland, it's homogeneity. In Qatar, it's massive wealth. In Bhutan, it's social policy (the government actually measures Gross National Happiness). In Thailand, it's not thinking too much. In India, it's spirituality. In each country he chats with cabbies, meets with someone vaguely relevant to his topic, and has surprisingly little insight for a veteran foreign correspondent. To provide a little variety, he also travels to the world's unhappiest non-warzone: Moldova. His findings there confirm pretty much everything I've ever read about the miserable country, as well as the bleak stories related by friends of mine who've worked there. He also travels to Slough, England to look at whether or not a made-for-TV experiment to raise the city's happiness had any lasting effect.

While some of the individual situations and conversations he has are kind of interesting, none of the chapters hold together particularly well, nor do the succession of them lead to any insight. Everything comes to the reader through his grumpy middle-aged, upper middle-class white male perspective, and his constant attempts at self-deprecating levity fall flat throughout. He somehow manages to make travels to some pretty interesting places remarkably unmemorable. I've been to some of the same places (Iceland, Switzerland, Thailand, Slough) and I have family or close friends who've been to all the rest (yes, including Moldova and Bhutan), and I'm struggling to think of a single insight I gleaned from this book either about happiness or other cultures.

A great crash course
I recently went on a 3 week vacation to Morocco, and while my travel partner knew some French, we wanted to have our bases covered when speaking the local languages. I had initially planned to buy just the phrase book but decided to go for the cd combo. Boy was that a smart move. I never would have figured out the pronunciation with out it! I spent most of my hour commute each morning in the weeks before the trip, playing and re-playing just the first few chapters over and over in my car, practicing the sounds. The lessons did not have all the key phrases I wanted - at least in what seemed to me like an appropriate order of importance (shouldn't "where's the toilet?" be one of the first things you learn when traveling to any new country?!) but over all taught me a lot of great pleasantries that really helped make our trip easier. Granted, the French came in way more handy throughout most of our travels, but just being able to say "thank you" correctly in Arabic helped make us a lot of friends along our trip. I would definitely recommend this as a crash course in Moroccan Arabic, but suggest a few French lessons as well if you are just looking to get by as a traveler.