Clearly explains the science behind the power of creativity.
A successful industrial designer with a prolific career offers insights for tapping into the mind’s creative power.
Nutting (Language of Nature, 2005) analyzes the creative process using his own industrial design experiences as examples. With a career spanning 55 years, which included designing everything from arcade games to cookware to the Jeep Grand Wagoneer, Nutting has plenty of experiences to formulate his analysis. This slim volume doesn’t outline a step-by-step process for achieving creativity as much as it explains the workings of the brain. It contains a clear, concise and understandable explanation of memory and how it works. The discussions of quantum physics, the creation of the universe and the life and function of atoms are equally straightforward and lucid. These sections are the book’s main strengths: making complex scientific concepts comprehensible. Connecting these concepts to the creative process and explaining how understanding them can improve one’s ability to master one’s own mind is not quite as apparent. Nutting describes “Thought Talk,” a meditative state that stimulates the subconscious mind, as a way of tapping into the mind’s full potential. The book could have done without the inclusion of “Rap-Rhymes,” which are short couplets of rhyme meant to help readers remember important concepts. Inserted in the midst of this succinct text, they are distracting and, in some cases, silly. Nutting ends the book with a “Postface,” and the purpose of this section is even less clear than the Rap-Rhymes; he describes what “might have been” if only someone had listened to his ideas of a universal operating system. Instead, his efforts were sidelined by those whom Nutting believes were shortsighted men, so it was Bill Gates, not Nutting, who emerged as the king of personal computing. Given the many notable accomplishments that Nutting recounts in the book, it makes for a sour epitaph for an otherwise illustrious career.
Clearly explains the science behind the power of creativity.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-1478719243
Page Count: 66
Publisher: Outskirts Press Inc.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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