From David Byrne of the band Talking Heads, a reckoning with how breakthroughs across the arts and sciences get forgotten, and how they get rediscovered
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.
