Overall Rating and Opinion of The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World

[Scott]

This topic is for discussing the January 2019 Book of the Month, The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World. Please do not post in this topic if you not yet read the book.


What is your overall opinion and rating of the January 2019 Book of the Month, The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World?

Do you recommend this book to others? Why or why not?

What do you like most about the book? What do you like least?

[Tehsorso]

I though the book was engaging and helpful enough to be worth a read, and I appreciated the central theory - that human creativity is based on three operations: bending, blending and breaking - though I do think that, upon closer analysis, some of the creative output can be due to a combination of operations, rather than a single one; but that's perhaps a discussion for later.

I also appreciated the multitude of examples - I can see why many would find them repetitive, but I thought they were pretty interesting information in themselves, and they were generally pretty well integrated into the structure of the book.

What I didn't find particularly inspiring was the creativity = software analogy, which I found painfully simplistic and, considering the propensity of writers to make these types of analogies, rather boring. I remember having read somewhere an analysis of the various frameworks used by thinkers to understand the human mind, and this process usually involves comparing the mind to a technological concept that is widely used during a specific period. From clock to book to TV to software and what not, they are all simplistic and I think do more harm than good to the argument. Again, however, this is perhaps not the place for this discussion, though I'd appreciate to hear your thoughts on this particular analogy.

Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone interested in art and psychology, as well as to anyone looking for a pleasant non-fictional book.