Creating Minds is one of the most enjoyable as well as one of the most informative books I have ever read. Recently, I re-read it and enjoyed it even more.

I have long admired Howard Gardner’s research on multiple intelligences which he discusses in other works such as Intelligence Reframed (2000), Frames of Mind (1993), and Multiple Intelligences (also 1993). As Gardner explains in the Preface, this volume “represents both a culmination and a beginning: a culmination in that it brings together my lifelong interests in the phenomena of creativity and the particulars of history; a beginning in that introduces a new approach to the study of human creative endeavors, one that draws on social-scientific as well as humanistic traditions.”

Specifically, this “new approach” begins with the individual but then focuses both on the particular “domain,” or symbol system, in which an individual functions and on the group of individuals, or members of what Gardner calls the “field,” who judge the quality of the new work in the domain.

This is the approach he takes when analyzing the lives and achievements of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi. Throughout the book, Gardner makes brilliant use of both exposition (e.g. analysis, comparison and contrast) and narration (especially when examining causal relationships of special significance) to reveal, explain, and evaluate each of the seven geniuses.

For example:

“Picasso erected in his own mind a superstructure or narrative that was a thinly veiled pretext for behaving just as he wanted to: he convinced himself that he had to place his work and his survival above all other earthly concerns in order to realize his artistic mission.

“The final exception [to being unable to think beyond his gift] – and the one most important for art history and for our study – was his relationship, for something less than a decade, with Georges Braque. The personal and work linkage was sufficiently powerful and enduring that it allowed the two men, working in tandem, to compose a new chapter in the history of Western art. Picasso suppressed his ego and his individuality as he had not done before nor did thereafter, and as a consequence, he was able to open new vistas. Later on, he was to call this the happiest period of his life.”

Howard Gardner is the Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi was first published by Basic Books in 1993 and later reprinted in 2011.