HAPPINESS AND OTHER SMALL THINGS OF ABSOLUTE IMPORTANCE (2016)

What is your happiest moment? How can you know it? Do we waste time or does time waste us? Are questions about meaning truly meaningful? What's really important? How do our emotions, our desires, our imagination and our understanding of our ever changing relationship with meaning help us to define and understand what happiness really means and what really matters. Drawing on literary and philosophical sources ranging from Alice in Wonderland, Winnie the Pooh and The Little Prince to Descartes and Nietzche, Haim Shapira invites us to challenge our perspectives on happiness and provides us with alternative ways we may view what is important. As Haim concludes it is the spaces in between the possible paths that we might take, where we are able to find a place of grace that the important things that matter to us will light our way. The choice is ours.

This book is meant to change your perspective on almost anything.  Shapira tackles complex issues about life and love, happiness, money and sex, needs versus desires, relationships, fantasies, infinity, and other very practical issues with charm, wit, warmth and an almost encyclopedic knowledge of literature and philosophy.  Childhood heroes like the Little Prince and Alice, and the giants of intellectualism that shape our culture—Plato, Chuang Tzu, King Solomon, Thich Nhat Hanh, Tolstoy—all play a part in both shaping Shapira’s questions and illustrating his points.  He also mines stories from his own life as he seeks answers.

Shapira’s books have published only in Israel:  Ecclesias—The Biblical Philosopher, What Really Matters, Conversations on Game Theory, and Infinity—The Never Ending Journey.  All four titles were long running #1 bestsellers.  He is Israel’s #1 lecturer and quite the performer with his grand piano, at ease cracking jokes, talking in many languages (yes, English!), and explaining quite intricate ideas to rapt audiences from all walks of life.   

"A seriously playful book that will inform, transform, delight as well as enlighten you"—Tal Ben-Shahar, Author and Harvard University Lecturer

Rights: Watkins Publishing, US; Ediciones Urano, Spain; Book 21 Publishing Group, Korea; Sperling and Kupfer, Italy