WALT DISNEY PRESENTS THE PASTORAL SYMPHONY FROM THE FANTASIA SOUNDTRACK LP

WALT DISNEY PRESENTS THE PASTORAL SYMPHONY FROM THE FANTASIA SOUNDTRACK LP



Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney (P.S.)

Kingsley Amis described Paul Johnson's Intellectuals as “a valuable and entertaining Rogues' Gallery of Adventures of the Mind.” Now the celebrated journalist and historian offers Creators, a companion volume of essays that examines a host of outstanding and prolific creative spirits. Here are Disney, Picasso, Bach, and Shakespeare; Austen, Twain, and T. S. Eliot; and Dürer, Hokusai, Pugin, and Viollet-le-Duc, among many others.

Paul Johnson believes that creation cannot be satisfactorily analyzed, but it can be illustrated to bring out its salient characteristics. That is the purpose of this instructive and witty book.

Customer Review: Dr. TMS
Really tedious. A few good chapters, but on the whole, it's not about creative courage, it's about what Johnson happens to like about particular people. So the reader doesn't learn as much about whomever as one might hope.
Customer Review: Four stars for the facts, two for the tone...
If you ever read the syndicated political columns of William F. Buckley, the premier American literary conservative of his era, you undoubtedly recall that once in each effort he threw in an obscure vocabulary word, precisely used by him, never encountered by his readers before. It was educational, if you had a dictionary handy, but because this quirk of his was used judiciously, (one might say conservatively), it was forgiven. Mr. Johnson, obviously a fine scholar with a great education, who has rubbed shoulders with some of the best thinkers of the 20th century, has the Buckley flaw, but to a fault. It seemed that a word or a foreign phrase which baffled me popped up 300 times. I have four years of college and I'm not inexperienced in the world at age 63, (as of yesterday) but I found this word-dropping to be offensive. The one time I ever saw Bill Buckley in person, he did his trick in a way that also offended me: The week of Martin Luther King's murder I saw Buckley in a debate on civil rights with Julian Bond at Vanderbilt University, and Buckley, referring to the assassination, called it a "regicide" which was too cute by half, and should have been resisted by such a disciplined man. Johnson almost goes that far as well. One learns a great deal about the famous and the relatively famous thinkers and creators he profiles between these covers, but his prose style is cumbersome, and his attitude tedious. It took me weeks to read this, because I was only content with putting up with the book for four or five pages at a sitting. I know a lot more about the subjects of this volume now, but I also know a lot more about its author, and that makes me little interested in his other works.