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 frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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