Review

Mansion of Happiness

What do Milton Bradley’s Game of Life, breast pumps, Stuart Little, Karen Ann Quinlan and eugenics have in common? In Jill Lepore’s engaging new book, “The Mansion of Happiness,” they are the touchstones along the existential footpath of life. “A History of Life and Death” – as the subtitle has it – could easily be a plodding, exhaustive disquisition; Lepore is a professor of history, after all. But her alter ego is as a New Yorker staff writer, and so she develops each chapter with an essayistic contour, diving in at an unexpected angle and then weaving a narrative that may perambulate historically, geographically and contextually. Yet we always come out at the other end with a thoughtful sense of how our society has grappled with these foundational concepts. More