Choice Review

Whether one is content or happy, discontent or unhappy is difficult to assess accurately at the human level, but when applied to a city, country, or geographic place and its collective inhabitants, the idea of happiness takes on different--yet intriguing--meanings and applications. Though rankings of locations are fairly common and involve multiple criteria, the synonymous entity of contentment or happiness was not apparently well measured nor studied until this global research project evolved, according to the author Cybriwsky (Temple Univ.), a professor of geography and urban studies. Using a self-generated happiness-contentment scale that culls the top and bottom 20 cities among 196 countries and thousands of candidate cities reviewed for the study, the author does not rank his findings but instead groups them using various data indicators that contribute to his quality-of-life definitions. Current socioeconomic, political, and life experiences; recent current events; and future outlook define many of these criteria, which he explains in short essays about each selection. He treats independently in its own chapter the US's top (and bottom) five states and ten cities. Essays explore each locale and reference other rankings or studies that illustrate the perceptions and provide comparisons. This insightful, enlightening work of urban geography is well-organized and indexed, providing a balanced understanding of the dimensions of happiness, explored in both its positive and negative contexts. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels. --Julia M. Gelfand, University of California, Irvine