Flower Shops Weiner AR

Weiner AR Press

Something in the Water

COMMENTS To set out in search of the geographical roots of genius sounds, as Eric Weiner freely admits, like a “colossal fools’ experiment.” An intellectual search for El Dorado. And as he sets out for Athens, the first stop on a global tour he describes in “The Geography of Genius,” I felt inclined to agree. My fears grew as he settled into an Athenian coffee shop and began riffing on vice, geography, liberty and all the other possible ingredients that led to an explosion of culture in the fifth century B.C. Three hundred pages of idle journalistic thumb-sucking seemed to loom ahead, culminating in a chapter on Silicon Valley, whose status as a hotbed of genius doesn’t strike me as at all obvious. But there are some writers whose company is worth keeping, whatever the subject. Bill Bryson can noodle on everything from Shakespeare to English bathroom plumbing and his audience remains enthralled. There were those old New Yorker writers who could somehow make 10,000 words on sphagnum moss fascinating. And Mr. Weiner is blessed with this gift. He is a prober and questioner, a big-hearted humanist who will always take a colorful, contradictory reality over some unfounded certainty. Why is it that genius isn’t equally distri... http://www.wsj.com/articles/something-in-the-water-1452211350