Uncommon Genius: How Great Ideas Are Born

by Denise Shekerjian

Overview

Drawing on interviews with 40 winners of the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship—the so-called "genius awards"—the insightful study throws fresh light on the creative process.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780140109863
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/01/1991
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.09(w) x 7.67(h) x 0.61(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Denise Shekerjian is a writer, author, and attorney. Shekerjian has published two nonfiction books and nearly a dozen literary essays. She also assists clients with memoirs, blogs, resumes, essays, grants, and other nonfiction material. Her writing specialties are the creative process, law, and politics. She has received two Pushcart Prize nominations, a New Jersey Council on the Arts award and was a Marshall Fellow in Civil Liberties. She holds an honorary doctorate in letters from the University of Vermont.

Table of Contents

In the Beginning
Part One
1. Talent and the Long Haul
2. Taking on Risk
3. Staying Loose
4. Setting Up the Conditions
5. Learning Through Doing
Part Two
6. Investing Your Work with a Vision
7. A Change of Perspective
8. A Shift in the Scenery
9. Sustaining Concentration and Drive
10. Encouraging Luck
11. The Harmony of Instinct and Judgment
Part Three
12. Despair and Isolation, Madness and Meanness
13. Building Resiliency
14. For the Love of It
The Forty Fellows
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

Poets John Ashbery and Joseph Brodsky, ecologist Lester Brown, psychiatrist Robert Coles, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, filmmakers John Sayles and Frederick Wiseman, writers Brad Leithauser and Ved Mehta, woodworker Sam Maloof and comic Bill Irwin are among the 40 MacArthur fellows who discuss the subject of creativity with Shekerjian ( Competent Counsel ), who proves to be an effective interviewer and catalyst. They express their thoughts about talent and genius, instinct and judgment; the effects of despair, isolation and madness; and the importance of inspiration, drive and discipline, learning through doing, taking advantage of luck, ``staying loose'' and building resiliency. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This is a well-written, breezy, at times eloquent jaunt through the subject of creativity with 40 MacArthur award winners, including psychiatrist Robert Coles, art historian Henry Kraus, and conservationist Patrick Noonan. Sherkerjian, a former attorney and author of Competent Council , provides glimpses of the creative process in lively prose that both helps explain the work of the Fellows and illuminates for the rest of us the process-oriented, risky, unpredictable, and often frustrating conditions under which creative strides are made. For adult and young adult readers, something creative and hopeful.--Terry McMaster, Utica Coll. of Syracuse Univ. Lib., N.Y.

Library Journal

Shekerjian interviewed forty winners of MacArthur Foundation Fellowships--the "genius awards"--to write this absorbing (sometimes conversational, sometimes analytical) guide to the creative process. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews