It's Not How Good You Are, Its How Good You Want to Be : The World's Best Selling Book
by Paul Arden
Average Customer Review:
Paperback (01 June, 2003)
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Reviews (20)

Fluff
I read the whole book while standing at the shelf in a bookshop. Absolute fluff. Don't waste your time or money.

It's a book about life for anyone...
It's a book about life for anyone, if you get it. I was going to go to the book store and read it, but after reading the first few pages, I bought it so my wife and kids can read it as well.

Not for everyone, short of a book
This isn't a book, but a collection of vague ideas, in huge font, aimed towards those in the advertising/marketing field. Of course, this isn't evident from the blurb or the title, misleading one into thinking that it is a motivational book for all.

The ideas are few, haphazardly linked, and the message simple and obvious. You may find use in this if you are in the above line of work, but even then, I think there are much better books on the subject than this. ... Read more

Isbn: 0714843377
Sales Rank: 35843
Subjects:  1. Advertising & Promotion    2. Business & Economics    3. Business / Economics / Finance    4. Business/Economics    5. Creativity    6. Motivational & Inspirational    7. Personal Growth - Success    8. Sales & Selling - General    9. Self-actualization (Psychology    10. Self-actualization (Psychology)    11. Self-realization    12. Success    13. Self-Help / Creativity   

Artist's Way, The PA (Inner Workbook)
by JuliaCameron
Average Customer Review:
Paperback (28 February, 2002)
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Editorial Review

With the basic principle that creative expression is the natural direction of life, Julia Cameron and Mark Bryan lead you through a comprehensive twelve-week program to recover your creativity from a variety of blocks, including limiting beliefs, fear, self-sabotage, jealousy, guilt, addictions, and other inhibiting forces, replacing them with artistic confidence and productivity.

This book links creativity to spirituality by showing how to connect with the creative energies of the universe, and has, in the four years since its publication, spawned a remarkable number of support groups for artists dedicated to practicing the exercises it contains. ... Read more

Reviews (174)

It changes lives
I bought The Artist's Way because two people told me it changed their lives and I figured it must be pretty powerful. Just couldn't get into it. But I persisted and formed a group to study the book with me. Fantastic! I really think it's best understood as a group works through it, sharing ideas and insights. Obviously those who are already highly creative might not find it helpful, but most of us need help to find our creative selves. I've facilitated two creativity groups which have been meeting for several years. Cameron's book, I believe, has changed all of us, strengthening our sense of self and opening us to new creative possibilities. Some of the exercises may seem silly, but invariably the ones which felt crazy to me helped someone else and visa versa. The lady knows what she's doing; the universe does fling open unsuspected doors. It's changed my life in some amazing ways.

It inspired me to write this...
Firstly, I like it when people want to get creative, get down with the parts of themselves that they haven't done that, paint, write, do the things they want to and I truly wish this book would help would help rather than hinder that process.

To vent my spleen first...Ms. Cameron's work is like being forcefed a nasogastric tube of industrial grade saccharine. To be blunt, I liked The Artist's Way better when it was Creative Visualization. I am familiar with self-help books remixing and recombining new ideas, but a lot of The Artist's Way seems entirely too much like Creative Visualization; I also feel that what Ms. Cameron adds can be detrimental rather than helpful.

Ms. Cameron's few reasonable ideas get caught up in reams of exercises that don't seem to lead to much in the way of artistic development and had me thinking " Well, I could write a story in the time it would take me to do Morning Pages and have a date with myinner artist child".
Throughout The Artist's Way,it seems that the only art being produced is cure-centric and it seems like Ms. Cameron has cornered the market on this particular malady. There are a few decent ideas--taking time for oneself is one, as is journaling--but the context, I think, saps them of any real usefulness.
Likewise, Ms. Cameron namedrops about the films she had produced, her plays and her former relationship with Scorsese, which strikes me as questionable at best; there is little said about her current efforts, which may be telling since it seems like The Artist's Way is it. At any rate, it does give me enough pause to mention it.
Plus, the suggestion of a week without reading or media struck me as really privileging one form of creative output over another; some artists thrive on the interplay of texts, the mixup between them and what happens when they collide and it rubbed me the wrong way. I also found her discussion of art and sexuality to be at the best, questionable (ie, her revelation that artists don't need to be promiscuous (or substance users )and that female artists don't need to be gay strikes me as tacky and yet another weird form of privilege that seems to lie under much of the text.

This book may help some people, but a lot of her approach really left me cold. For all of her insistence that there are many ways to be creative, there seems to be only one way--and that's hers.
(Likewise, something about Ms. Cameron's book really screams"Take the class and buy the notebooks too!")

Overall, I'm certain this book has helped some people, but it seems like it can leave a lot to be desired--the sexuality issue is a hot one for me, as is the unspoken praise of a particular kind of art. Still, journalling and meditating are good in whatever form you get them and I'm glad that this book has helped some people-- I just wish there wasn't all this weirdness to wade through to get there.

I'm guessing the audience for this book ismore of a suburban one that does need a wakeup call for a happier and/or more creative life. Good for them for wanting a wakeup call and working towards it and I do hope this book gets them some joy; however, I think that the cure may be worse than the disease in Cameron's work.

It will change your life if you let it
A very dear friend bought this for me - Nakissa if you read this get in touch! - and the book changed my life. I am a journalist by profession, but thought that I didn't have the right to write my own stories, only other people's. Well this book transformed all that, made me see where I had been blocked and all the internal baggage about what 'being creative' meant, that I had been carrying around without realising! Once I got clear of all that I started taking my dream of being an author and my creative impulses seriously, thanked the Creator for blessing me with this gift and I am now working seriously on my first novel. It's been a long time coming but I WILL get there. Thanks Julia. ... Read more

Isbn: 1585421464
Subjects:  1. Art    2. Creation (Literary, artistic,    3. Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.)    4. Creative Ability    5. Individual Artist    6. Inspirational    7. Inspirational - General    8. Problems, exercises, etc    9. Self-actualization (Psychology    10. Self-actualization (Psychology)    11. Self-realization (Psychology)    12. Art / General   

Path of Least Resistance : Learning to Become the Creative Force in Your Own Life
by ROBERT FRITZ
Average Customer Review:
Paperback (22 April, 1989)
list price: $13.95 -- our price: $11.16
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Reviews (28)

The Path of Least Resistance
How I never found this book until recently, I will never understand!It is a wonderful book and I have bought copies for many family members.If you have read a million self-help books but are still in the same rut, this is the book that will get you on your way to getting the life you want.

Wordy
Lots of good info, but tends to get lost talking about the same subject over and over, but well worth the read.

Bold and brilliant
Written 2 decades ago, the latest edition has been extensively revised (70%). The title sounds like a chapter from a textbook of engineering or physics as do some of the chapters, but the book really gives billiant new concepts behind manifesting our desired realities. The author-musician, who seems highly opinionated against the "new age", understandably never uses the term "manifesting". At times, the reading gets a little tedious, as this not merely a description of the steps in a "process" but rather an excellent attempt to elucidate the very original concepts that the author is trying to expound. Even so, this treatise on the principles of the creative "FORCE" is highly readable and leaves the reader feeling that he has gained understanding and insight into an area that appears seeminly elusive... ... Read more

Isbn: 0449903370
Sales Rank: 23415
Subjects:  1. Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.)    2. Creativity    3. Motivational & Inspirational    4. New Age    5. Personal Growth - Success    6. Psychology    7. Success    8. Self-Help / Motivational   

TOUCHED WITH FIRE: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament
by Kay Redfield Jamison
Average Customer Review:
Paperback (18 October, 1996)
list price: $15.00 -- our price: $10.20
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Editorial Review

The march of science in explaining human nature continues. In Touched With Fire, Jamison marshals a tremendous amount of evidence for the proposition that most artistic geniuses were (and are) manic depressives. This is a book of interest to scientists, psychologists, and artists struggling with the age-old question of whether psychological suffering is an essential component of artistic creativity. Anyone reading this book closely will be forced to conclude that it is. Very Highly Recommended. ... Read more

Reviews (48)

An Analysis of the Artistic Temperament
Who is this, who is this in the night of the heart?
It is the thing that is not reached,
the ghost seen by the soul...
~Sorley MacLean

Touched with Fire reveals its secrets in startling revelations and comforting commentary. Throughout this brilliant work, Kay Redfield Jamison exhibits an insightful and calmly observant approach in the midst of manic-depressive complexity.

She explores the reasons artists, writers, and composers are often fearful of the dampening of creativity through the use of chemicals like lithium. Although she often notes the tendency towards various addictions artists use to escape the erratic nature of mood disorders.

The creative temperament seems to feed off emotional turmoil and often in the works of great poets we can feel the soul's turbulence. The reality of heightened imaginative powers, depression, insomnia, fatigue, rapid thoughts, inflated self-esteem, panic attacks, rage and emotional intensity of various varieties can all swim about in an ocean of ever changing periods of heightened creativity and suicidal tendencies. Within this ocean, brilliance is often born and fed by the storms raging in artist's minds.

For the most part the author explains how many can life a normal life, yet as we read the descriptions and excerpts, we soon realize many danced too close to the cliff of despair and became a danger to themselves. Kay Redfield Jamison presents sweeping overviews of many authors and then delves into individual experience. She uncovers the lives of Robert Schumann, Ernest Hemingway, Vincent Van Gogh, Herman Melville, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

According to the author and extensive analysis of current research, moody musicians, volatile poets and troubled artists may in fact be bipolar. This theory is explored in depth with over one-third of the book dedicated to cataloging the researcher's sources.

There is much to learn here, like the difference between cyclothymia and manic-depressive illness. Some of the artists heal themselves through artistic expression, especially in May if they don't commit suicide in the same month. Others produce more writing in autumn.

Poetry led me by the hand out of madness. ~Anne Sexton

As the lives of numerous mercurial writers are explored, a common thread of creativity weaves itself into a blanket of madness which seems to seek to suffocate its victims with torturous emotions and dark nights of the soul.

This then becomes a fascinating and intellectual read for anyone who has an interest in writing, poetry, psychiatry or the artistic temperament. If you write poetry or enjoy writing in general, this book could be most revealing and will explain why at times you might stay awake for 24 hours writing like mad and then have absolutely no desire to write for weeks at a time. While the author focuses on more extreme cases of bipolar disorder, she does give hope to the world by explaining that many who have bipolar disorder do mostly live normal lives. If you can call being on an eternal rollercoaster of intense emotions normal or even bearable throughout an entire life.

While people who are bipolar may have periods when they feel absolutely fine, there is always the fear of the unknown, the dark night that is again fast approaching. After reading this book you will understand authors like Dorothy Parker, Virginia Woolf and Anais Nin in a new light even though the author doesn't mention Parker or Nin.

~TheRebeccaReview.com
Author of Moonbeam Moths

Let's you inside their minds
I recently had the privilege of hearing Dr. Jamison speak.In her book and in her speech, she does a wonderful job of explaining how it feels to have Bipolar Disorder.Her descriptions and guidance make it much easier to understand why this disorder generates such wonders and tragedies.I highly recommend her work to people who have Bipolar Disorder and their family members.

Sheryl Gurrentz, author
If Your Child is Bipolar

You can be depressed without being a great artist
This book is both psychological analysis and literary criticism. Its main thesis is that there is a causative connection between manic- depressive illness and creativity. But it chooses to establish this thesis in a largely anecodotal and inconclusive way. Of the tens or perhaps even hundreds of thousands of creative figures we know of as part of world culture she selects less than a dozen, and tells their story. She tells the story often with an overabundance of quotation and without great conviction. All this contrasts with the surprising power of her first book , " An Unquiet Mind".
There is another problem. All of us have moods, and that means that all of us are down sometimes. And that too means that most of us have a certain tendency to depression. Mankind is a bipolar creature in this sense perpetually on the continuum of moods. Does it make much sense to choose those artists who were deeply depressed and analyze that depression as cause of their art ? Why not analyze the much more numerous group of people who are not artists, or who failed completely in art and were depressed?
I also would say that the depressive, or manic - depressive label seems to me tremendously simple when it comes to talking about creative personalities whose understanding of moods , and whose creation of them is so various and rich. We know little about the emotional life of Shakespeare. Was the creator of so rich a world of characters depressed? What about Goethe with his Olympian serenity and his power of overcoming? Tolstoy was a very deep depressive but his major depression came after he had created his great works and not before it.
In short I am suspicious of the thesis of the work, and certainly do not believe it has been proven here. Redfield is a very good writer and provides much interesting information mainly in the literary department. ... Read more

Isbn: 068483183X
Subjects:  1. Artists    2. Authors    3. Creative ability    4. Creativity    5. General    6. Manic-depressive illness    7. Mental health    8. Mood Disorders    9. Psychology    10. Psychology & Psychiatry / General