Publisher and editor in chief Susan S. Szenasy remembers the endless curiosity of Horace Havemeyer Ⅲ and the lessons it provides for all of us moving forward

摘要

I was constantly fascinated by what caught Horace's eye as he romped through his library of books on history, buildings, people, places, things-in fact anything that opened his mind to humanity's enduring efforts to create a better world. He loved a great story beautifully told. One of his favorite books was Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. Its beginnings are well documented, in writing and on film. It seems that Diamond, trained in the natural sciences, was doing field work in Papua New Guinea where a local asked him, "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo [read stuff], but we black people had little cargo of our own?" In other words, why had Europeans conquered so much of the world?