Customer Reviews

Everyday Creativity and New Views of Human Nature: Psychological, Social and Spiritual Perspectives

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

 

 

An outstanding book. It has given me new insights into creativity. Having read many books on the subject, I feel its consideration of Asian as well as Western ideas about creativity supplies a fresh perspective. It also taught me practical ways of improving my own work, an almost-finished historical novel about British India, the field of my Harvard Ph.D. in history.

Which brings me to another strength of the book: It is accessible to a non-psychologist like myself. It has a minimum of jargon, a fine bibliography, and lucid style.

To solve our age-old problems we need new ways of thinking. Ruth Richard's very valuable collection of authors on everyday creativity show us that creativity is a force that is alive, fluid and interconnected with everything in the universe--it is truly revolutionary. It shows us new ways to think about the world and create a healthy future.
Ilene A. Serlin, psychologist, author of Whole Person Healthcare (2007, Praeger). Whole Person Healthcare [Three Volumes]

This is a remarkable book. Rarely do I come upon a book as useful and insightful as Everyday Creativity. Edited by Dr. Ruth Richards, Everyday Creativity once and for all frees us from the cultural myth that creativity is solely the province of a few rather than the fundamental craft of life it is meant to be. As Dr. Richards says: "Seen as a process, even a way of life, our everyday creativity offers whole new ways of thinking...." This book does exactly that - offers us new ways to think.

Richards, a national expert in the field of creativity, brilliantly collects and then weaves the work of colleagues from many disciplines into a tapestry of understanding. We see creativity from views as diverse as chaos theory and audience flow to spiritual balance and large scale learning patterns. Then, demonstrating what she is telling us, Richards uses her own creativity to summarize this diversity in her chapter "Twelve Potential Benefits of Living More Creatively". With the clarity and richness of her summary we are handed a powerful tool with which we can honor and grow our own creativity.

This book should be a must read for anyone interested in understanding our most essential human nature.

The premise of this book is that creativity is not a secret talent allotted to a chosen few, but rather a human capacity that we can all use for problem-solving and for enjoyment.

I agree. I felt just as creative when I was improvising a tool to pull up wall-to-wall carpets during remodeling as I did when I was writing a poem. The most unexpected situations call for creativity. A costumer for the San Francisco Opera was explaining what his work is like. He described the occasional crisis in his business - a cleaning fluid ruins the tenor's waistcoat the day before opening, the soprano is ill today and the understudy is three sizes smaller -- and how they solve the problem on the spot.

This is not just a frivolous viewpoint held by liberal-arts types. A survey by IBM of 1500 CEOs in May, 2010, found that of all the qualities they look for in a prospective employee, the highest-ranked was creativity. I was reminded of the Apollo 13 explosion and the creativity of the engineers on the ground who had to design an entire new set of survival mechanisms to rescue lost astronauts - instantly! So developing and cultivating your own creativity can be rewarding in many ways.

This book is for people who are seriously interested in knowing what researchers have discovered about human creativity - what it is, what supports it, its role in our evolution, and how creativity can help us solve our most pressing problems. Thirteen essays by experts in creativity give solid scholarly information about the field. The last essay integrates the book and suggests specific benefits of setting aside the notion that "I'm not creative" and welcoming creativity into your life.