This may be a book's best ever summary of itself: "when fishing for happiness, catch and release". With a title that inverts one of the inalienable rights established by the American Declaration of Independence, The Happiness of Pursuit is for fans of enquiries into the nature of brain, mind - and happiness itself. When the author Shimon Edelman was 8, he came upon Christopher Logue's poem Epitaph, which asks: "What is the greatest happiness on earth?" The poem was embedded in a story which turned on the possibility of writing a happiness algorithm. As a computer scientist and psychology professor, Edelman could not rest until he had made the case for happiness to be given a scientific, perhaps even algorithmic, explanation.
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