Discover the cognitive tools that lead to creative thinking and problem-solving with this "well-written and easy-to-follow" guide ( Library Journal).Explore the "thinking tools" of extraordinary people, from Albert Einstein and Jane Goodall to Mozart and Virginia Woolf, and learn how you can practice the same imaginative skills to become your creative best. With engaging narratives and examples, Robert and Michèle Root-Bernstein investigate cognitive tools...

Nonfiction_the 'fourth genre' (along with poetry, fiction, and drama)_is a literary field affecting bestseller lists, writing programs, writers' workshops, and conferences on the study of creative writing, composition/rhetoric, and literature. It is often labeled and/or limited as 'creative' or 'literary' nonfiction and subdivided into essay, memoir, literary journalism, personal cultural criticism, and narratives of nature and travel. A vital and growing form, nonfiction has, until now, n...

When longtime author Robert Root moves to a small town in southeast Wisconsin, he gets to know his new home by walking the same terrain traveled by three Wisconsin luminaries who were deeply rooted in place—John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and August Derleth. Root walks with Muir at John Muir State Natural Area, with Leopold at the Shack, and with Derleth in Sac Prairie; closer to home, he traverses the Ice Age Trail, often guided by such figures as pioneering scientist Increase Lapham. Along the ...

Scientists as artists?! The idea may sound strange, even unlikely, yet The Arts of Eminent Scientists demonstrates that many of the world's most respected scientists have been extraordinarily talented amateur, even professional, artists.56 scientists, 40 of them Nobel Prize winners or nominees, produced the rarely- or never-before-seen paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, textile art, jewelry, and bespoke puzzles that illustrate this book. A brief text describes the motivations...

In The Art of Touch: Prose and Poetry from the Pandemic and Beyond, the unique voices of thirty-nine of some of the most creative thinkers of our times have been brought together to consider the profound impact of one of our five main senses: touch.Psychologists, healers, massage therapists, academics, creative writers, and others reflect on or tell personal stories about what it means to be able to touch or experience touch, or to have to go without it—as so many did and ...

Reflecting on how a student’s parents met because of a fly ball to center field in a summer softball game, author Robert Root wondered how the lives of that student’s parents and of the student himself would have changed had the batter bunted or struck out. Haunted by this pure example of happenstance, he began to ponder his own existence, dependent in part on geology (the Niagara Escarpment) and history (the Erie Canal). He wondered how happenstance had influenced the course of his parent...

A world traveler, Isabella Bird recorded her 1873 visit to Colorado Territory in her classic travel narrative, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains. This work inspired Robert Root’s own discovery of Colorado’s Front Range following his move from the flatlands of Michigan. In this elegantly written book, Root retraces Bird’s three-month journey, seeking to understand what Colorado meant to her—and what it would come to mean for him.Following Isabella is a work of i...

Eating clay, drinking urine, applying honey to deep wounds and mere plaster to crushed these are all folk remedies for ailments, passed on through the generations and thoroughly discounted by modern science. It is too bad, write scientist-historian couple Robert and Michèle Root-Bernstein, who deplore the loss of proven methods developed without the blessing of the academy, noting that "formal academic systems are only one of many ways in which knowledge is discovered, accumulated, and tra...