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Summary
Summary
All of us have experienced creative connection, and glimpsed its power. Yet, for centuries, the myth of the lone genius has obscured the critical story of the power of collaboration.
In Powers of Two , Joshua Wolf Shenk argues that creative pairs are the exemplars for innovation. Drawing on years of research on great partnerships in history - from Lennon and McCartney to Marie and Pierre Curie, plus hundreds more in fields including literature, popular culture, art and business - Shenk identifies the common journey pairs take from the spark of initial connection, through the passage to a cognitive 'joint identity' to competition and the struggle for power.
Using scientific and psychological insights, he uncovers new truths about epic duos - and sheds new light on the genesis of some of the greatest creative work in history. He reveals hidden partnerships among people known only for their individual work (like C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien), and even 'adversarial collaborations' among those who are out to beat each other. This revelatory and lyrical book will make us see creative exchange as the central terrain of our psyches.
Author Notes
Joshua Wolf Shenk is an essayist and independent scholar whose work has appeared in numerous magazines and in the national bestseller Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression. He has written for The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, New Republic, the Economist, U.S. News and World Report, and other publications. His book, Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness, has won awards from the Abraham Lincoln Institute, the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, and the National Mental Health Association.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this intriguing yet uneven study, Shenk (Lincoln's Melancholy) explores the nature of creativity as defined and manifested through numerous pairings, ranging from true partnerships like John Lennon and Paul McCartney's to rivalries between competitors such as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Shenk looks at how such duos nudge one another toward greatness, provide the missing ingredient in a winning formula, add a spark of inspiration, and so on. He looks at scientific teams (James D. Watson and Francis Crick), artistic pairs (Theo and Vincent van Gogh), business partnerships (Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger), and familial rivalries (the sisters who wrote the Ask Ann Landers and Dear Abby columns). Each category can further broken down into six stages-meeting, confluence, archetypes, distance, the infinite game, and interruption-to show how such pairs need not be limited by proximity, friendship, or even cooperation. One of the most telling stories is the rivalry between basketball legends Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, who never even dared to relax their tension lest it impact their performances. While the narrative is somewhat disjointed, leaping from one pair to the next with dizzying speed, the material remains interesting, even eye-opening, illuminating a complicated subject. Agent: Betsy Lerner, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Shenk (Lincoln's Melancholy:How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness, 2005, etc.) debunks the myth of the lone genius [that] has towered over us like a colossus and its counterpart, the most common alternative [that]locates creativity in networks.The author admits that he was drawn to the topic by his own sense of isolation. In his view, creative partnerships share some features of romantic couples and may have an erotic componente.g., the relationship between the famous Russian-American choreographer George Balanchine, who brought the artistry of the Ballets Russes to America, and hisprotg Suzanne Farrellbut their main purpose is the creative work they share. Shenk ranges over a large territory encompassing the partnerships of Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett (who collaborate on investment decisions), Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (joint creators of the field of behavioral economics), Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg, poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy (whose journals provided material for his poems), and many others. However, the core of the book is the relationship between Paul McCartney and John Lennon, who not only founded the Beatles, but whose songwriting collaboration changed the landscape of pop music. The author uses the evolution of their partnership, which began in 1957 when they met in Liverpool, to illustrate many of his themes. These include the shared interests and backgrounds that bring two people together, the development of trust as their collaboration deepens and the complementarity of their roles even to the point of rivalry. In many instances, one member of the pair may appear to dominate, but both have essential rolese.g. in their comic duo, buffoon Lou Costello got the biggest laughs, but straight man Bud Abbott was the head guy.Shenk's inclusion of fascinating biographical material enlivens his provocative thesis on the genesis of creative innovation. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
THE PAIR is a precious unit - private, generative, even holy. We can explore a couple's inner workings if we have an invitation to do so. Otherwise, we must use any available external means: letters in archives, revealing anecdotes, loose-lipped quips in interviews. In order to understand creativity, we must learn from couples, Joshua Wolf Shenk argues in his new book, "Powers of Two." Defying the myth of the lone genius, he makes the case that the chemistry of creative pairs - of people, of groups - forms the primary (albeit frequently hidden) structural basis of innovation. Pairs don't often let us pry them apart, looking to see who contributed what. John Lennon wrote what would become "Strawberry Fields Forever" and Paul McCartney came up with "Penny Lane" as a rejoinder, yet their music is credited to both of them, written "eyeball to eyeball," as Lennon put it, or "like mirrors" in McCartney's view. Neal Brennan and Dave Chappelle have long agreed to keep private who wrote what in their comic sketches. "People always ask Ulay and me the same questions," the artist Marina Abramovic told Shenk about her former partner. "'Whose idea was it?' or 'How was this done?'... But we never specify. Everything was interrelated and interdependent." The daughter of Marie and Pierre Curie said that her parents' work was a fused endeavor. It's nearly impossible to distinguish their contributions by looking at their laboratory notebooks, where handwriting by each covers the pages. Shenk's "Powers of Two" is a rare glimpse into the private realms of such duos. He writes with his face "pressed up against the glass" of paired figures from the present and the past-adding the likes of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien to the pairs mentioned above. At first, Shenk seems an unlikely author to focus on creative teamwork. "I am among the more isolated people I know," he admits. "I have spent the vast majority of my adult life alone. Even when in the company of others, I struggle to direct my attention outward, rather than toward the constant murmuring and shouting in my head." Yet Shenk's solitary state also gives him an invaluable insight: The true nature of partnership, he argues, extends to that most elusive pairing - an individual's relationship with his or her inner voice. Rainer Maria Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet" forms the narrative spine of Shenk's small but sterling chapter about "the 'other' of the psyche," co-creation with some unknown force. Throughout, Shenk inserts testimony about this mysterious yet timeless process, from Paul Simon describing how he writes songs by acting as "a transmitter" to Elizabeth Gilbert's TED talk about co-creation with the muses and then to Rilke receiving the first line of the "Duino Elegies" from the unknown elsewhere. "The point is," Shenk writes, "we don't create by ourselves, even when we're alone." Yet creating with an internal pair is not enough. Shenk reminds us of this in a well-chosen quotation from a letter Emily Dickinson sent to Thomas Wentworth Higginson asking for his thoughts on her poetry: "Mr. Higginson, Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive? The mind is so near itself it cannot see distinctly and I have none to ask." Shenk devises a structure for his book by tracing the life span of various creative pairs, from their first meeting to their parting of the ways. He looks at many possible variations: the star and director archetype (George Balanchine and Suzanne Farrell, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, Mohandas Gandhi and Mahadev Desai), the competitive pair (Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, Ann Landers and her sister, Abigail Van Buren) and the hidden partnership (Tiger Woods and his former caddie Steve Williams). The result is a view of creative pairs ranging from those with friction and passion who "talk over each other wildly, like seals flopping together on a pier" to others, like Merce Cunningham and John Cage, who "behave with an almost severe respect, like two monks side by side." Yet ultimately, no matter what the type, he shows how pairs form "a single organism," communicating through a private language. "Why have so many of these relationships been obscured and neglected?" Shenk asks. He answers, in part, by reminding us of the willful blindness or unconscious bias that makes us attribute work to an individual when it was actually produced by a couple or in a group. Part of this is because of what the sociologist Robert Merton has called the Matthew effect - the better-known member of a creative pair often gets nearly full credit. (The name was inspired by a line from the Gospel of Matthew, "To all those who have, more will be given ... but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.") A natural storyteller, Shenk includes intriguing details in his depictions of figures we might assume we already know well - a glimpse of Dickinson, for example, listening to her father's funeral from her bedroom upstairs, the door left ajar. At times, though, he assumes too much familiarity on our part. He often makes a brief reference to a climactic moment in the life of a creative person - Jeff Koons, say, or Patti Smith - and then moves on. It can seem like narrative composition in prolonged staccato. Yet overall, "Powers of Two" is so thorough it could be the textbook for a course on creative pairs. In other words, it may be best read in stages. Shenk's language, when he steps away from his engrossing narratives, veers toward the academic, yet it's precisely this analytical sensibility that distinguishes his book from others that discuss creative couples, from Phyllis Rose's "Parallel Lives" to Rachel Cohen's "A Chance Meeting" and Harold Bloom's "The Anxiety of Influence." In his introduction, Shenk mentions the "chemistry" that helped inspire his project - with Eamon Dolan, who edited both his first book, "Lincoln's Melancholy," and this one - and then, in an epilogue, writes about the experience with a blistering fury that acquiesces into understanding. "I've lived every theme I describe here through our relationship," Shenk writes, yet it remains "an example of the chemistry that I intended to investigate." Shenk's candid statements give the reader a rare glimpse into the process of writing and publishing a book. To read Shenk's raw, uncommonly free confessional passages about his dealings with his editor is to understand the animating force of this endeavor. "Eamon, in his last round of edits, instructed me to end the book with an exhortation to readers 'to embrace the possibility of creative pairs in our own lives,"' but, Shenk admits, "I certainly don't feel like a man in a position to exhort." He confesses that a cascade of missed deadlines led him to finish his manuscript under duress. At the time, he worried that he wouldn't properly conclude his study of creative pairing because of difficulties with his own. Exploring Shenk's relationship with his editor unites "Powers of Two" in prose, concept and practice. If any reader doubts his thesis, Shenk's comments serve as a final reminder: Just when we think an innovation came from an individual, we see that it was, in fact, created for and with someone else - the other half of an often hidden pair. 'The point is/ Shenk writes, 'we don't create by ourselves, even when we're alone.' SARAH LEWIS is the author of "The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery" and a forthcoming book about Frederick Douglass, the Caucasus and the Civil War.
Library Journal Review
Starred Review. While many books purport to explain or evoke creativity in individuals, author and essayist Shenk (Lincoln's Melancholy) explores the dynamics of creative pairs how such partnerships are formed, how different types of duos collaborate, and how the relationships sometimes end. He vividly describes such well-known pairs as John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Steve Jobs and Steven Wozniak, Matt Parker and Trey Stone (the creators of South Park), and directors Ethan and Joel Coen but also includes people who are usually considered to be individual creators, such as Vincent van Gogh and his brother Theo, and choreographer George Balanchine and dancer Suzanne Farrell. Under tight deadline to finish the book, the author writes in the epilog that he considers himself and his editor Eamon Dolan as a creative pairing, despite living on opposite sides of the country and communicating infrequently. VERDICT This wonderful book sheds new light on an overworked topic, and the numerous anecdotes make it a pleasure to read. Anyone with any interest in psychological issues of creativity or in cultural history will tear through it. [See Prepub Alert, 2/24/14.] Mary Ann Hughes, Shelton, WA (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.