Professor Robert E. Lane's book The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies is a difficult book to review. Its canvas is large, the topics it covers are so varied and the academic disciplines it deals with are so many that the scholarship required in the reviewer is almost beyond the reach of any social scientist, who most likely would be a specialist in one field or another. Politics, economics, philosophy, psychology, to name only a few disciplines, are all there. Professor Lane's scholarship is real and impressive. Not without reason has Robert D. Putnam of Harvard University described Professor Lane as one of the nation's most thoughtful and creative political scientists. A hundred pages of notes and references to the extensive literature covered give an idea of Professor Lane's tremendous academic reach.