Amy Reiter

As a foreign correspondent for National Public Radio, Eric Weiner has spent much of his career traveling to some of the world’s least happy places — Iraq and Afghanistan among them. With his first book, “The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World,” he decided it was time for a change of approach. “What if, I wondered, I spent a year traveling the globe, seeking out not the world’s well-trodden trouble spots but, rather, its unheralded happy places?” he writes …

In Brief: “The Geography of Bliss” (The Barnes & Noble Review)

Perfume — love it or hate it, you probably don’t know much about how it’s made or the people who make it. Chandler Burr, the New York Times perfume critic (yes, you heard me right), would like to change that. Burr’s revealing new book, “The Perfect Scent: A Year Inside the Perfume Industry in Paris and New York,” aims to bring consumers “behind the curtain” of the perfume industry, despite that industry’s best efforts to keep its art and science out of public view. To that end, he interweaves the stories of two perfumes — the high-end Hermes scent Un Jardin sur le Nil, created by veteran perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena, and Coty’s Sarah Jessica Parker Lovely, which the “Sex and the City” star guided to an unusual degree — from conception to launch …

In Brief: “The Perfect Scent” (The Barnes & Noble Review)