作者Wiki
1937年出生,六歲學鋼琴,
父親是醫師,母親是教師
大學念人類學、哈佛學院拿歷史學位(1958)
劍橋三一學院拿生理學的博士(1961)
1964年初次前往新幾內亞的旅程啟發了他
回哈佛擔任研究員~1965
1968年 UCLA擔任醫學院生理學教授
之後轉UCLA擔任地理學教授(學了十幾種語言…哇)
作者個人網頁-裡面有他個人成長歷程的回顧
摘錄:
It’s
said that if you want to understand a person and you are permitted to ask them
only two questions permitting only one-word answers, the two most important
questions to pose are: “Where were you born?” and “When were you born?”
出生在哪個地方與什麼年代,會顯著影響一個人…
One of the basic lessons of life that I learned from New
Guinea is an attitude towards risks -- specifically, towards doing things that
involve very low risks each time you do them, but that you're going to do
hundreds or thousands of times. A "Eureka moment" came
one afternoon when I picked a campsite in the jungle underneath a tall, dead
tree. I was surprised how frightened
the New Guineans with me were of sleeping under that dead tree that night. When
they said that the tree might fall down, I answered, "Look, it's not going
to fall down tonight." But after
hearing stories of New Guineans killed by dead trees, and after hearing trees
fall down in the jungle, I gradually realized that, if you're going to spend
every night of your life in the jungle and you are not careful about dead
trees, sooner or later that low-risk event of a dead tree falling on you will
catch up with you.
面對風險的態度:不要睡在枯樹下=>如果你忽視那些極小的風險-早晚那些風險會找上你
Another
basic lesson of life that I learned from New Guinea was how to deal with
apparently hopeless situations. When I
first went out there, I encountered quite a few life-threatening situations,
where I thought that the next day I wouldn't be alive. When those situations first arose, they were
paralyzing; I didn't know how to deal with them, or to deal with myself while
in them. Gradually, as I survived one
after another of those situations, and I then found myself in yet another
life-threatening situation where I didn't see how I would be alive the next
day, I was able to tell myself: "Well, you've
been before in situations that seemed to have no possible solution, and somehow
the next day you've woken up still alive.”
Working
in academia, and writing about geography and environmental history, are things
that I love. It's not work: it’s
fun. I happen to get paid for that fun,
but if someone tomorrow gave me ten million dollars, I would continue my job as
professor of geography at UCLA, because it's what I most enjoy. In retrospect, if I had known at Roxbury Latin School
that I wanted to end up as a historian or geographer, I think I still would
have followed the trajectory that I did.
I would have prepared myself by studying
biology, because from it I learned the comparative method, which is valuable
both in field biology and in history.
Languages are important tool for understanding history. Understanding
the New Guinean lifestyle has been important for me in understanding the
lifestyles of peoples around the world, throughout history. And so what I actually did for 45 years,
although it wasn't geography or history, was good unplanned preparation for my
present career in geography and history.
Already from Roxbury
Latin School
also came my love of writing. Writing lets me spend time reading up on all
these interesting things, going to the effort of trying to understand them and
to explain them to myself, and then explaining them to others in the same way
in which I have tried to explain them to myself.
作者世界級精采的人生寫出世界級的書,豐富了敝人與許許多多其他人的心靈