Byrne guides us on a captivating quest to understand how we come to remember forgotten ideas, inventions and technologies ... Byrne’s analysis is both cleareyed and hopeful ... Belongs on the bookshelf of anyone who cares about creativity or culture. Eventually, it may become a sleeping beauty itself, one that deserves to be reawakened by future generations.
These stories of vindication are inherently compelling ... The patterns are faint. Mr. Byrne’s categories are fairly arbitrary, as he admits ... Disappointing that Mr. Byrne writes so little about his own experience as a reanimator ... The past is never dead, perhaps, but if it’s only sleeping, sentences like this won’t wake it up.
Byrne’s subtitle – Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up – makes it sound like a business manual in the cultural industries section of an airport bookshop ... If his prose can sometimes be a bit matey (of Caravaggio he asks: 'Why was he such a crazy asshole?'), he can also be sardonic ('A lesson for contemporary collectors sequestering their assets in places like the Geneva Freeport – there’s a risk the work will fall out of the conversation') ... There’s an (inter)national curriculum here that schools and universities would do well to champion: engage with science and with art, be open to play and to metaphor, consider all that is counterintuitive.
David Byrne’s new book, for a musician, is strangely tone-deaf ... There is a sense of dictation about the book ... The real conundrum is the rattle-bag nature of the project ... That is not to say that there are not a lot of interesting things in the book; merely that is seems almost capricious ... The enthusiasm in this book is overshadowed by the quibblesome nature of it all.
Extensively researched ... Byrne’s writerly voice is conversational and engaging as he marvels at the sheer scope of human ingenuity and the alchemy of time, place and people that leads to world-changing awakenings.
Delightful ... The book loses steam as Byrne slows down to list requirements for sleeping beauties ('useful and relevant'; 'accessible') and necessary conditions for their reawakening, like cross-disciplinary collaboration. Still, the cumulative effort wisely counsels against recency bias ... It’s a wonderful and humbling celebration of the lost and found.
If music doesn’t pan out for Byrne, he has a viable sideline as a pop-history writer—he has a wry, entertaining, and informed voice ... An affectionately curated assortment of tales about human ingenuity saved from the dustbin of history.
