The Anatomy of Happiness
by. M.D. McGraw-Hill, $3.50.
“Happiness,” writes Dr. Gumpert, “is a state of mind which is caused by the release of tension. Unhappiness is caused by the inadequate release of tension. This is the most simple and most comprehensive definition I can think of. It puts the ageold problem of human happiness into biological terms. There, I believe, it belongs.” In the forty-eight brief chapters that follow, Dr. Gumpert, a specialist in the medicine and pathology of old age and author of the best-selling You Are Younger than You Think, attempts to clarify “the patterns of happiness — and unhappiness — as they appear in actual daily experience in every physician’s life.”
The result is an intelligent, garrulous, digressive, and at some points debatable book that leaves practically no stone of daily life unturned, from housing to gout, from snobbishness to insomnia, from love to allergies. How much of The Anatomy of Happiness is good sense and how much nonsense the individual reader will have to weed out for himself.