Book Review-The Geography of Genius By Eric Weiner

 I became aware of this book when I was reading a list of  Bill Walton’s favorite books after his passing, this title popped off the page. I have been reading and learning about genius and its place in our culture recently and this title had a unique spin on the idea of genius, and what idea means in human consciousness. The idea that a place, at a given time, can play a role in creating a hothouse for original thinkers that nurtures an environment that is conducive to growing creativity seemed intriguing to me.

I had previously read and enjoyed  Sparks of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World's Most Creative People by Robert S. Root-Bernstein (Author), and Michele M. Root-Bernstein. https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2022/01/book-review-sparks-of-genius-by-robert.html Which delved into the kind thinking tools that are employed by creative people as well as the changes in perspective these people employ to open their imagination. I used that reading experience as preparation in anticipation of this reading experience. The central topics are different for the two books, as this book is focused on the seven cities/locations had experienced a golden age of creativity and innovative thinking, writ large as the author had identified: Athens, Hangzhou, Florence, Edinburgh, Calcutta, Vienna, and Silicon Valley. Vienna had two chapters devoted to it as the golden ages happened at different times and the Viennese golden ages were focused on different areas of genius. The order of the cities roughly follows chronological order.

The author travelled to these cities, stayed there for an extended period of time, met and interviewed people in those cities who are knowledgeable about the histories of the cities as well as the people who created those golden ages. Since the author is a travel writer, his descriptions of the visits to these cities play a key role in his narrative and are a major source of reading enjoyment. His sense of how to document history as well as his ability to spin a yarn all contributed to a most entertaining narrative.

The most important part of the very enjoyable narrative is the author’s ability to stay with the main theme of his mission, which is to find out what qualities each of these cities had that made their golden age possible, the salient reasons why it happened to these cities and not others. A particularly helpful technique that the author uses is to continuously reiterates salient points that he made in the previous chapter, this helps bind the new narrative with the older narrative. It reminds the readers of what they had read previously, it helps the reader  synthesize the contexts of the idea with each new city, to integrate the ideas in their thoughts, and to help the reader compare and contrast the different manifestations of those ideas while never losing the  different flavors  of the concept which are solely attributable to a specific city.

A case in point is his focus on the social aspects of each city and how the social life feeds the creative spirit of the city. Places like: the Agora of Athens, the Hangzhou West Lake, the piazzas of Florence, the clubs of Edinburgh, the addas of Calcutta, the Café’s of Vienna, and so on. The places where people can meet, converse, and argue freely; be seriously challenged in a public setting to properly test their ideas; have an honest exchange of ideas without residual ill will, all under an umbrella of civility. The unique feature present in all the cities is that the group interaction never devolves into groupthink, which is what usually happens in modern day brainstorming sessions. There are many ground rules which make these social group interaction successful, the main difference is that the conversation is not sharply focused on specific subjects and that the purpose of the social interaction is quite dispersed and amorphous, which allows for the participants range broadly or deeply, as they please; whereas the modern day brainstorming sessions are set up for being useless because they are usually convened by people with an agenda to keep the subject narrow and focused. The social interactions described by the author are rarely convened by authorities or people with specific agenda, it is a free flowing free for all about everything and nothing at the same time.

This is just one example of the author’s writing expertise that draws the reader in, as he clearly integrates the common factors from all the cities to give us broad yet well-thought-out conclusions. It was all I could do to keep track of the salient points because there are so many of them. His various impressions about these cities reinforced the broad general observations that he made about the salient elements that caused the creative tensions that brought out the possibilities for each city to have a golden age of creativity.

It was obvious very early on in my reading that if these salient factors that are existent in these cities were implemented artificially in a generic city, golden ages of creativity wouldn’t necessarily blossom in those cities; correlation does not equal causation. I  recognize that these factors the author identified are the serendipitous results of the meeting of minds, those factors, and quite a bit of luck. However, it is always interesting to find out about the intangible factors that serve to incubate a vast amount of intellectual thought from seemingly disparate groups of people who are brought together by circumstance to a geographic location.

I so enjoyed Eric Weiner’s ability to aggregate ideas, his way with words, and his ability to communicate the key lessons from the history that he is writing about that I had purchased a few of his other books to add to my already teetering TBR pile.