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The Geography of Genius

a Search for the World's Most Creative Places From Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley
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Feb 26, 2016StarGladiator rated this title 1 out of 5 stars
This guy is really into the George Leonard School of Writing: continuously citing supposition as fact! Of course Michael Faraday didn't attend college - - he came from a quite impoverished background! Yes, Bill Gates was a college dropout --- but Gary Kildall, the creator of the operating system, CP/M [which Gates & co. ripped off and renamed DOS], had a master's degree! The author, Weiner, states that Leonardo da Vinci was a poor student. Having read just about every book published on Leonardo in four languages, the overwhelming evidence is that he was a superlative student, but his life was legally circumscribed due to his bastard birth [couldn't legally marry, couldn't legally father children, was only legally allowed three occupations - - which Weiner got wrong also - - any infraction was punishable by death]. When the author speaks of education and genius, he assumes the educational process to be an absolute, never changing or varying through the ages - - we call this type of assumption sheer idiocy! Weiner has a very annoying habit of trivializing Leonardo [would highly recommend the brilliant physicist, Fritjof Capra, and his book, Learning From Leonardo, to appreciate the extent of Leonardo's genius]. Weiner, predictably, blames the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba on President Kennedy, ignoring that it was planned under Eisenhower and Nixon, and Kennedy had just commanded a PT boat in WWII, while Eisenhower commanded EVERYTHING - - even so, JFK had serious reservations and decided against the all-out invasion, and the planned assassination of Castro, being assured a local uprising would ensue - - and the CIA was wrong again, of course! [Having a Soviet satellite state so close to America was strategically intolerable back then, but the author fails to note that, naturally, even though JFK was extremely anti-colonialist, highly supportive of African independence from Algeria to Kenya - - such thinking not susceptible to Weiner's irresponsible trivialization! [Weiner appears completely oblivious to true genius such as GFB Riemann, Nicola Tesla, Philo Farnsworth, Edwin Armstrong, Gary Starkweather - - demonstrating a failing grasp of his subject matter!]