A cultural history of the concept of happiness challenges popular beliefs about how such goals as wealth, an ideal body, and anti-depressants have actually affected happiness levels in the past, in an account that tests popular scientific perspectives that promote dogmatic or ritualized modes of self-care. By the author of Doubt: A History.
Jennifer Michael Hecht is a philosopher, historian, and award-winning poet. She is the author of Doubt: A History and The End of the Soul; the latter won the Phi Beta Kappa Society's 2004 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award. Hecht's books of poetry include The Next Ancient World and Funny. She earned her Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and teaches at The New School in New York City.