“The Geography of Geniuses”, by Eric Weiner: in search of the most inspiring places in the world

Darwin’s theory of evolution was consolidated while he was traveling in a car; Freud developed one of his best theories in his favorite café; Beethoven took long walks in the woods for inspiration and García Márquez revealed to him the first paragraphs of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” during a road trip.

Is it possible that the great ideas of geniuses arise in a specific place? If we all went to these places, would we all of a sudden be geniuses? In 416 pages, the North American bestseller Eric Weiner examines the connections between the environments we inhabit and the most innovative ideas we are capable of conceiving.

In a journey that traverses 1900 Vienna, Renaissance Florence, ancient Athens, the brilliant Song dynasty Hangzhou, and Silicon Valley, among other sites, Werner leads readers through the settings in which, historically, they have produces the most ingenious ideas of mankind.

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From “The Geography of Geniuses” is an engaging read as the author travels the world and through time to show readers how creative genius flourishes in particular places. With humorous prose, Eric Weiner he walks through the scenarios that have illuminated figures such as Socrates, Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci, among many others, wondering what was in the air at those specific times and places, and to what extent it would be possible to keep everything in a bottle.

Across different periods of history, Weiner identifies these sites and refers to them as geographical spaces as “clusters” of genius, and to the men they hosted as creative geniuses.

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Referring to Athens and its thinkers, the author maintains that the city was not predestined to be the center of the ideas of so many philosophers and artists who ruled the world for centuries, but was a moreover city, one of the biggest ones, that unlike others, like Sparta, it had a great intellectual brilliance.

It was not a blessed land; Its prosperity, the author maintains, was due to a question of the attitude of its occupants, which made it the basis of their culture.

“Actually, the Greeks didn’t invent as much as we tend to think, but they perfected a lot of what they discovered,” Weiner says, noting that Silicon Valley might now be the expression of this spirit that welcomes and thrives on diversity to create.

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Speaking of Florence, he says that its great period of artistic production, in the Renaissance, was due to the encouragement of creative genius by its patrons, and when he evokes Edinburgh in the 18th century, where figures such as Adam Smith, David Hume and James Watt, the author, point out that they used to meet at an Oyster Club every Friday to eat oysters, drink wine and have a long chat on a wide range of topics. .

Eric Weiner defends that the current dynamic of science, the arts and, in general, of all spheres of daily life, has meant that over the decades the emergence of new geniuses has been interrupted or at least reduced . Openness, dynamism, chaos and discernment around good ideas no longer obey the same conditions as before, making it much more difficult today to differentiate between what is brilliant and what is not.

Award-winning journalist, author of Bestseller and lecturer, the North American also wrote The geography of happiness, man seeks God there The Socrates Express. His books have been translated into over twenty languages. Weiner is a former foreign correspondent for National Public Radio and journalist of The New York Times. Currently, he collaborates with The Washington Post, BBC trip there AWAYamong other publications.

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