An upbeat guide to the creative process.
A versatile entertainer shares encouraging advice.
Actor, comedian, screenwriter, and producer Cleese, co-founder of Monty Python and co-writer and star of the British TV comedy Fawlty Towers—among many other achievements—draws on his long, accomplished career to offer a slim compendium of random musings on creativity. He is convinced, he writes, that “you can teach people how to create circumstances in which they will become creative.” Contrasting “quick, purposeful thinking” with ruminating, based on Guy Glaxton’s Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind, Cleese admits he was surprised to discover the power of the unconscious in creative processes. The unconscious is “like the language of dreams. It shows you images, it gives you feelings, it nudges you around without you immediately knowing what it’s getting at.” Although, like many people, he was taught to privilege analysis and critical thinking, he came to believe that creativity flourishes in “an atmosphere of uncertainty and gentle confusion.” Creative people, he has found, “are much better at tolerating the vague sense of worry that we all get when we leave something unresolved.” Among many pages of helpful hints, Cleese suggests that people are most likely to be creative doing something they know and care about, but they should avoid complacency. When they are sure they know what they are doing, “creativity plummets. This is because they think they have nothing more to learn.” They shouldn’t be afraid of fallow periods, which can serve “as preparatory to the fertile ones”; nor of panic, which the author has found energizing. As for asking for help, Cleese writes that he always shows his work to others, alert to their responses, but not necessarily adopting their advice for how to fix something: “you and only you must decide which criticisms and suggestions you accept.” While many of Cleese’s observations and suggestions may seem obvious, his candor is endearing.
An upbeat guide to the creative process.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-34827-0
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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