BY PAUL JOHNSON
While there are no scientists/engineers chosen, you will still enjoy what you learn from the list of creators profiled.
4 stars out of 5 stars
This is one of historian Paul Johnson’s trilogy on Intellectuals, Creators, and Heroes. It is interesting that, among the 12 intellectuals, 30 heroes, and 17 creators profiled, not a single one belongs to the category of engineer/scientist. If you can overcome this bias, you will learn something from each book, including the one under review, “Creators”.
As someone trained and worked in science and engineering, I was surprised to find no scientist/engineers among the “Creators”. The author himself stated, in the last Chapter, that he had no satisfactory answer to why he had included nothing about the sciences. Nevertheless. I did learn from reading the book. Here are a few examples:
- Chaucer added more than 1,000 words to the English language.
- Mozart, when he was nineteen, wrote all five of his violin concertos of extraordinary quality in a single summer.
- The painters Albrecht Durer and Ramon Casas, both of whom I knew nothing about before I read the book. Durer was an influential painter in German Renaissance. Casas was the painter in Barcelona who made Picasso realize that he would not get to the top in the field of conventional painting. This led Picasso to create his own style. He replaced “fine art – paintings composed 10 percent of novelty and 90 percent of skill – with fashion art: images where the proportions were reversed.”
- The number of creations of Picasso exceeded 30,000. He was a multi-millionaire but, from the portrait in Johnson's book, a most despicable human being.
- The clock tower which houses the bell known as the "Big Ben" in London, was completed to the design of A. W. N. Pugin, who was principally remembered for his pioneering role in the Gothic Revival style of architecture
- The work of Louis Comfort Tiffany, an American artist and designer who worked in the decorative arts and is best known for his work in stained glass.
- Hokusai Katsushika, a contemporary of Joseph William Turner, not only painted Japanese landscape but also portrayed Japanese life in the first half of the nineteenth centuries with dazzling graphic skill. He is the only Asian profiled in Johnson’s three books.
There is a chapter on fashion designers Cristobal Balenciaga and Christian Dior. The reader needs to be deeply interested in lady’s fashions to be able to read through the 22 pages of this chapter.
In chapter 4, Johnson stated categorically that “Shakespeare is the most creative personality in human history.” The reader may well ask: What about Beethoven, Michelangelo, Edison? It seems rather pointless to single out one individual among different types of human activities.
In chapter 1, the author begins with what to me is a very profound statement:
“One of the most important forms of creativity is to make people laugh. We live in a vale of tears, which begins with the crying of a baby and does not become any less doleful as we age. Humor, which lifts our spirits for a spell, is one of the most valuable of human solaces.”
It is therefore surprising that there is no comedian profiled in the book. This is compensated somewhat by the following quote in the chapter on T S Eliot:
“There is nothing quite so stimulating as a strong dry martini cocktail.” – T S Eliot
Link to Amazon Review: :https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R12HWFUABOXS29?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp
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