Jared Diamond in the BBCs "Desert Island Disks" is one of my favourite recordings.
About eight years ago, when I read Diamonds's acclaimed book, "Guns, Germs and Steel - The Fates of Human Societies" , I remember being amazed at the the breadth of his scholarship. What I did not know at that point was that writing non-fiction was just one of his many talents. Apart from being a professor at University of California, he is also a musician, a linguist, an ornithologist and evolutionary biologist!
According to him, "The more things you're interested in, and the more you learn, the richer the framework into which you can fit any new thing!".
Into this framework Diamond also fits in the imperatives of geographic determinism. For those who extoll the power of the "human spirit", he has a suggestion - "Try standing on the North Pole in a T-shirt and see where the Human Spirit can get you".
This is one Desert Island Disk you should not miss - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0006dlz
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