The Nature Of Creative Development

Writing from the perspective of management science, Feinstein (Yale School of Management, Yale U.) puts forth a model of the creative process that sees the creative contributions of individuals as being rooted, in the final analysis, in their particular interests. He seeks to demonstrate this by drawing on biographical and other information to reconstruct the creative processes of such figures as writers Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, economist John Maynard Keynes, painter Piet Mondrian inventor Thomas Edison, and McDonalds founder Ray Kroc, in addition to interviews with creators from academia and elsewhere. In telling these stories, he describes how creative interests and conceptions of creative interests help define distinctive self-guided paths of creative development that in turn make possible particular creative achievements. He also considers the implications of this model for understanding the larger process of cultural development. Annotation c2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)