The Creativity Book

book_mg_7340Creativity and Beyond: Culture, Values, and Change, State University of New York (SUNY) Press, 350 pages of text and photographs, published March 2000, has remained in print for two decades. It is available on Amazon.com and other booksellers.

Reviews:

“The author considers creativity from a myriad of viewpoints and over a long period of time. He injects fascinating examples, vignettes, and hypotheses. I have been interested in creativity for many years and I have never seen the topic treated as coherently and as completely as Robert Weiner does in this book. I found it fascinating.”

James L. Adams
Former Dean of Engineering, Stanford University, and author of Conceptual Blockbusting:
A Guide to Better Ideas and the Care and Feeding of Ideas: A Guide to Encouraging Creativity.

La lectura de un libro como ‘Creativity and Beyond,” del profesor Robert Paul Weiner, sera’ de gran provecho para los educatores y los encargados de definir la orientacion del sistema educativo.”

Daniel Marranghello, La Prensa Libre (Costa Rica), 3/14/2001

“In this ambitious, fascinating, copiously referenced work, Weiner traces the interpretation and application of the terms create and creativity as they have evolved in the Western world over the centuries. Enriching this sweeping historical perspective, which begins with prebiblical gods and creation myths, is the discussion of the meanings and roles of creativity in the uniquely structured American environment and comparisons with Chinese, ‘traditional,’ and some other ‘non-Western’ cultures. Weiner also explores the personal and cultural obstacles to creativity and the shifting tensions between the new and the established, and he emphasizes how, in the emerging global culture, the definitions and values of creativity are changing. This stimulating treatise, based on a compendium of history, philosophies, and trends culled from a wealth of disciplines, is highly recommended for academic and larger public libraries.”

Suzanne W. Wood
SUNY College of Technology,
Alfred Copyright Cahners Business Information

“Not before the early modern epoch did we in the West start reflecting on our amazing creative potential, and seldom did our reflection venture beyond our own time and space. In this book, Robert Paul Weiner takes us on a tour to our past (biblical as well as classical) and to the civilizations that surround us, showing the presence of a creative drive in even the most ancient and traditional ones. We emerge from it with new insight, yet also with new wonder for the mystery of being human.”

Louis Dupre’
Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, Philosophy, Modern Studies,
Yale University, and author of Passage to Modernity and The Other Dimension.

“Creativity and Beyond . . . provides a well-researched, cross-cultural view of a difficult to define but important to understand concept. We are a culture built on and obsessed with creativity; it is very important that books like this explore creativity, and this does so from a novel point of view. Understanding more about the nature of the creative process and its particular manifestations . . . is crucial, not only to an appreciation of the arts, but also the insightful knowledge about the post-industrial burst of science and technology in the past half century. . .. the wording and the writing and the fascinating examples the author presents provide an extremely interesting read.”

Louallen Miller
Ceramic artist and Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies,
California State University, Sonoma.