Michael J Gelb

How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci- Seven Steps to Genius Every Day

2 stars (Kind of Pointless...) - The book was very well written and i must say that i really did enjoy the introduction chapters which was filled with bits of Leonardo's life, work, and other mentions of factual knowledge that was quite interesting. However, once the core of the book started to unfold it became very dry reading and the "self-help"'ish way the book is written becomes monotonous and i began to feel that Gelb himself is just too over enthused about Leonardo Da Vinci. I agree that he is a very noteworthy person to idolize and model your own life around to some extent but in some of the sections dealing with the senses and "what to do's" it seemed like he was stretching a bit and making Leonardo too godlike for his own right. Also, another qualm i had with the book was when he listed his own group of people he felt were noteworthy and i feel that it was tactless to do so because your ranking people from different genres, walks of lfe, skills and talents, and placing them as if it were the olympics in competition and it seemed to be another way to just give more praise to Leonardo in his fascination and obsession to put Da Vinci on some sort of pedestal. Again, i feel Leonardo was a brilliant man but to write a book solely on the content of how to think like him, i feel, is pointless and has no substance because he himself is not writing the book but only a mere fan who has never met the man, has no relevance to the time period Da Vinci lived in, and, again, ISNT DA VINCI writing a book about how to think like him. Many people reading this may say "well, what about biographies, those are people who may not have known the person they are writing about". Very true, but this is not a biography. Instead this is a list of thing you can do yourself to mock the way Da Vinci decided things, thought, and lived his life. These are purely things that only the living specimen that is Da Vinci would know. Any other person writing the book about the mechanics in which ...
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