A bunch of books about "happiness" came out at about the same time. I have to confess, this isn't the book that I thought it was, and I suspect I have it confused with one of the others.  As a result I was a little bit annoyed, and I ended up skimming vast portions of the book.  Which isn't its fault - it's just a result of inappropriate expectations, which is entirely due to me.

Daniel Gilbert is a psychology professor at Harvard, so we can assume he knows what he's talking about.  Apparently he's used to a combative audience (of smartypants Harvard psychology students, I imagine) because a huge portion of the book is devoted to defining "happiness."

This is an interesting point, and one which is probably crucial to a book which is more about psychology studies regarding human perception.  Less relevant to a "how to" sort of book, which is what I thought I was buying.  Gilbert raises a lot of good questions, and puts forth a lot of good arguments, but it's all the sort of "stoned undergrads staring at their hands" kind of thing that drives me absolutely batty.  You can ask whether we both see the same thing when we point to something and call it "yellow."  But then I will roll my eyes and change the subject, because frankly this kind of navel gazing is just not my thing.

See what I mean?  I didn't like the book, but it's totally not its fault.  Dear Stumbling On Happiness: it's not you, it's me.  I swear.

Sprinkled throughout are in depth discussions of various experiments which are relevant to the topic at hand.  These are interesting, and many of them were surprising, much like the stuff that gets brought up in any given Malcolm Gladwell book.  You can spend a lifetime studying the nuances of human perception and understanding, and clearly Gilbert has.

Fortunately, Gilbert also has a light hand as an author.  He uses a lot of humor, and I found myself literally laughing out loud several times.  Gilbert has a nice way of turning a phrase, and I imagine he is both a popular teacher, and an excellent addition to any dinner party.  Which is good news for his book, because the material at hand has the potential to be extremely dry.

Stumbling On Happiness has the same flaw that I find in Malcolm Gladwell's books, which is that it fails (or refuses) to draw conclusions.  Explaining an experiment and the results is all well and good, but so what?  What's the "action item" for the reader, if you'll pardon the annoying business jargon?  Frankly although the experiments and their results are interesting, I'm more interested in the conclusions we can draw from them.  

Let's say there was an experiment stating that if you release a glass of water in midair, it drops and makes a big shatter-y watery mess on your kitchen floor.  That's where a book like Stumbling On Happiness will leave it - messy floor.  

What I'm looking for is books that start with the conclusion (if you want to keep your floor clean, don't let go of your water glass unless it's on a table) and then work backwards through the studies.  Just explaining the experiment and results and leaving it there is like all lead-up and no follow-through.