Gardner, Howard : Harvard University

Howard Gardner is professor of education and co-director of Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and adjunct professor of neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine. He is the author of thirteen books, including Frames of Mind.

"A fascinating, ambitious, valuable map of modern creativity and the modern period."

--Catharine R. Stimpson New York Times Book Review

"In Creating Minds , Gardner joins a small cadre of scholars offering evidence that one can characterize genius. And in one of those rare instances of theories fitting real people, the descriptions match what today's most creative thinkers say about themselves."

--Newsweek

"Creating Minds is that rare thing, a thoughtful, richly textured book that can appeal both to the scientist and to the humanist "

--Houston Chronicle

Perseus Press Web Site, November, 2000

A path-breaking view of creativity, along with riveting portraits of seven figures who each reinvented an area of human endeavor.

"A fascinating, ambitious, valuable map of modern creativity and the modern period. "

"In Creating Minds, Gardner joins a small cadre of scholars offering evidence that one can characterize genius. And in one of those rare instances of theories fitting real people, the descriptions match what today's most creative thinkers say about themselves. "

Focusing on the moment of each creator's most significant breakthrough, Howard Gardner presents a fascinating look at the nature of genius as seen in the lives of Einstein, Freud, Eliot, Ghandhi, and other giants. Sixth printing.

Howard Gardner changed the way we think about intelligence. In his classic work Frames of Mind, he undermined the common notion that intelligence is a single capacity that every human being possesses to a greater or lesser extent. Now building on the framework he developed for understanding intelligence, Gardner gives us a path breaking view of creativity, along with riveting portraits of seven figures who each reinvented an area of human endeavor. Using as a point of departure his concept of seven "intelligences," ranging from musical intelligence to the intelligence involved in understanding oneself, Gardner examines seven extraordinary individuals - Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, T. S. Eliot, Martha Graham, and Mahatma Gandhi - each an outstanding exemplar of one kind of intelligence. Understanding the nature of their disparate creative breakthroughs not only sheds light on their achievements but also helps to elucidate the "modern era" - the times that formed these creators and which they in turn helped to define. While focusing on the moment of each creator's most significant breakthrough, Gardner discovers patterns crucial to our understanding of the creative process. Not surprisingly, Gardner believes that a single variety of creativity is a myth. But he supplies evidence that certain personality configurations and needs characterize creative individuals in our time, and that numerous commonalities color the ways in which ideas are conceived, articulated, and disseminated to the public. He notes, for example, that it almost invariably takes ten years to make the initial creative breakthrough and another ten years for subsequent breakthroughs. Creative people feature unusual combinations of intelligence and personality, and Gardner delineates the indispensable role of the circumstances in which an individual works and the crucial reactions of the surrounding group of informed peers...