"The trouble with most people is not that they are unhappy," University Of Toronto philosophy professor Mark Kingwell writes a third of the way into In Pursuit Of Happiness, his fourth book. "It is that they do not know how to think clearly about what happiness might be." By way of illustration, he investigates two thoroughly modern emotional quick-fixes: He spends a week eating brown rice and hugging strangers at an isolated "Inward Bound" retreat, then samples Prozac and St. John's Wort, which leave him feeling antisocial, clumsy, and deflated. It's no surprise that neither experience makes him happy, except insofar as they provide grist for his wandering but intellectually challenging discussion of the source and nature of real happiness, and how the modern era has misunderstood it. Kingwell starts and ends his quest with Socrates, but he bounces off Aristotle, Freud, Nietzsche, John Stuart Mill, Voltaire, Epictetus, and many others along the way. He discusses in depth how happiness has been commercialized, commodified, pathologized, and reified in the Information Age. He carves out distinct conceptual niches for happiness, joy, and contentment; indulges himself in critical reviews of Melrose Place, The Simpsons, and Star Trek; and generally holds forth on all manner of random topics in prose that ranges from chatty and anecdotal to primly didactic, even sanctimonious. He doesn't offer a guru's road map to happiness, instead writing about how to think about it—a concept much less fuzzy and abstract than happiness itself, though ultimately more sterile. Kingwell proves this himself when, after reaching his philosophical and scholarly conclusions, he describes in postscript the simple happiness Fred Astaire movies bring him. In effect, he makes it abundantly clear that experiencing happiness has very little to do with dissecting it. Still, he makes it equally clear that analyzing unhappiness is far more productive and interesting than simply bemoaning it.