Customer Reviews

Creativity: Unconventional Wisdom from 20 Accomplished Minds

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This was a terrific book -- not only educational, but a really good read. Each chapter contains an interview with some of the most accomplished people of this century -- many work in the arts but some are people who have had innovative ideas that have changed our world for the better. In the book you get insights from some fascinating individuals -- David Halberstam, Edward Albee, Dale Chiluly, Spike Lee to name just a few. Each chapter reads like an autobiography but with insights into what they believe inspired their creative lifestyles and accomplishments. I would highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to get a look into the lives of these fascinating individuals. It also made me think about how to bring more creativitiy into my life and the lives of others.

The questions are stimulating and the answers even better in this book about the creative process. This is a difficult process to unfold and the editors have chosen the cream of a very creative crop, like Julie Taymor, Spike Lee, Edward Albee and 17 other fascinating minds.

Gerstman and Meyers solicit personal information and anecdotes and encourage self-examination from these geniuses and near-geniuses to get closer to an understanding of what has inspired them to become what they are. In this I believe they have been very successful. A terrific book!

Creativity is just "doing what you want to do". If it winds up like everything else . . then it's not creative. If it's different it's creative.
Some people think for themselves . . some don't!

Perhaps it is only the title and subtitle that are grossly misleading, but I can hardly imagine a book missing the mark more. One wishes the two editors had shown more of the quality they claim they are examining.

This is really a book about creativity, design and marketing. The two editors, Meyers and Gerstman, are marketers (both overpaid former higher-ups at Interbrand -- and that should say it all). It is clear that their principal measure of creativity is money. So perhaps an alternative title would be "American Creativity" or "Creativity in the Land of the Golden Idol". That is, in a society which chiefly gauges virtue through wealth, what a surprise that creativity should be treated likewise.

The book is strikingly unimaginative and entirely devoid of inventiveness or daring in whom it chooses to plum the meaning of creativity.

There are some standouts -- Spike Lee, Edward Albee, Milton Glaser, Julie Taymor. But Erica Jong? Marvin Hamlisch? Two automotive designers? Why? And why Daniel Libeskind when he has demonstrated how uninspired and spineless he can be with the progression of the World Trade Center design fiasco?

Where are the daring composers, poets, scientists? Creativity has a great deal to do with upsetting convention, or at least challenging it. While several contributors pay lip-service to this, the book on the whole is sadly conventional. Most of the contributors are surprisingly uncreative in their thoughts on the nature of creativity.

And, finally, absurdly expensive.