The Geography of Genius

An interesting read taking a number of places throughout the history where the number of groundbreaking ideas born was very high. The author travels from one place to another trying to understand what made these places so outstanding. The selection he made is interesting, as most of them differ quite a lot from one another (like Athens from Edinburgh or Calcutta from Viena) and gives a wider view on what he tries to find out. It's not a ‘scientific' book, rather a light-hearted analysis of each of these places and the people who stayed behind their golden ages. The author thankfully avoided the temptation of creating an easy recipe to ‘cook a genius potion' and points into non-linear behaviour of such occurrences. I enjoyed the read and learned quite a lot about the history of philosophy and since, which is always a great thing :)