A sparkling blueprint for stimulating creativity.
A professional artist presents a guide to unlocking one’s inspiration and inventiveness.
In her debut how-to manual, fabric designer and artist Bloomston offers hands-on techniques and hand-holding encouragement to help overcome an inert imagination. The author recognizes that inspiration can be blocked and that creativity is sometimes offset by procrastination. In this book, she presents practical advice, motivational words, fun suggestions and write-in exercises in a colorful, highly attractive format designed to produce tangible results. The book’s design beautifully weaves together text, blank write-in spaces, stellar photos and a host of other charming design elements. The titular “spark” refers to a person’s creativity, which the author says is “like a pilot light—it’s always on, even if you aren’t using the stove.” She explores how to get cooking creatively in 30 short chapters that advise readers to, among other things, not be stingy with materials, begin with tiny goals (“achievable, quick steps you can take every day until you are less intimidated by starting”), carve out workable work spaces, discover personal learning styles and disrupt normal patterns of activity to “see the world with new eyes.” Along with encouraging quotes, the author offers practical ideas, such as keeping mugs and jars filled with markers and colored pencils at the ready for when inspiration strikes. The book also offers ways to “share your creations with the world.” Extremely valuable “Do This” exercises in each chapter invite readers to make specific items, such as a “soul box” or a “vision board”; to answer soul-searching questions; and to do activities outside the home that may be beyond one’s comfort zone: “Step outside the normal. Step outside the expected to find your creative self. Be curious.” Bloomston also offers her own personal anecdotes as well as stories and tips from numerous others; the extensive list of contributors includes designers, artists and business owners.
A sparkling blueprint for stimulating creativity.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1607059608
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Stash Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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