Customer Reviews

Creative Collaboration

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When I started reading this book, I gasped. As a professional scientist, I've had to chew on my fair share of indigestible scientific prose, but Ms John-Steiner's writing took the cake. See, for example, phrases like "In addition, I draw on the perspective of 'constructed knowing', which emphasizes situated, contextual and integrated modes of thinking over the more traditional and prevalent separate modes of knowing."
Fortunately, I'd do the author injustice by labeling her a bad writer, as the parts where she describes actual collaborations and collaborators are lucid, interesting, and quite readable. It's mainly in the more theoretical sections in between where the reader has to suffer through facts being forcefully shoved into the sacred Vygotzyan worldview, and the abstractness and complexity of the prose in those sections could have the purpose of making it easier for the author to gloss over errors in Vygotsky's model.
This book would have been twelve times better if the author had striven to keep the prose lucid and concrete, and had built a model from the facts instead of trying to force ill-fitting facts into the theoretical model she favours. Still, to be fair, I'd have to give this book four stars. Simply because, reading through it, almost despite the author's efforts, you get a good sense of the essence of good collaboration: shared vision, complementary skills, and slowly acquired trust in the other and willingness to be vulnerable/accept criticism. The ultimate book on collaboration will probably be written by a writer with a greater skill in using language lucidly and without the theoretical fixedness of John-Steiner, in the meantime you can learn a lot from this book about collaboration. Reading it is worth it, in my opinion, despite the bumpy ride...