It's snowing out today, and as we edge our way out of winter it's easy to get that cabin fever itch for a tropical white sand beach with warm trade winds and ethereally blue Caribbean water. Surely that would be the ultimate bliss. Not so, says Eric Weiner, author of The Geography of Bliss: One Grumps Search for the Happiest Places in the World.

In fact, Weiner's investigation, aided by findings at the World Database of Happiness (WDH), in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, finds that the island climes, which I have always thought must be heaven on earth, score in the surprisingly middling ranges on the happiness scale. If you can't find happiness in "paradise", you may be asking yourself, where on earth can you find it? The answer is not only surprising, but ultimately, perfectly sensible.

It won't be giving away anything that hasn't already been revealed in previous reviews and interviews with the author, to disclose that the happiest country on earth is, according to the WDH, Iceland. Yes, cold and in winter, nearly eternally dark Iceland is the home to some of the happiest folks on the planet.

I found that hard to believe, particularly since I'm one of those people who starts shivering when temps dip below 70 degrees, and grows grumpy when a cloudy day deprives me of my daily ration of sunshine. But I must confess, after following Weiner's world exploits in search of the source of happiness I found myself wishing I could visit Iceland...and a few other countries as well.

It turns out that happiness is less a result of being warm and lazy (rats!) and more the result of an environment that creates a sense of community and allows individuals to explore their inner selves. As a result, countries such as the Netherlands, Iceland and (finally, someplace warm!) Bhutan score high. But other factors can be superior sources of satisfaction, as well. So Switzerland, with its strong sense of structure and history, scores big happiness points, too.

Apparently it's true what the old adage says about money; it can't buy you happiness. But, in the case of Qatar, it can buy culture, or at least someone else's culture. That country's coffers are over-flowing, but it's immense and new found wealth has left a country of uber-rich living the high life at so great a cost that they have lost touch with their roots and are buying up the art of others to stoke their own culturally deprived senses. And it's not making them happy.

Other countries have new found independence, but at too great a cost. Moldova earned the dubious honor of rating at the very bottom of the happiness scale. Though the break up of the USSR should have created new found happiness, instead its countrymen feel disenfranchised from their roots, and the world at large. While the sun shines far more in Moldova than Iceland, Moldavians seem to be emotionally in the dark.