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Sleeping Beauties

Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up
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Sleeping Beauties

By: David Byrne
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We love to believe in a meritocracy of ideas - that genius is always recognised, innovation always seized upon and rewarded. Yet so many of the people we now recognise as the world's great creators initially got little traction for their work. It faded out, and it was only later, often much later, that it somehow came roaring back to life and made a lasting impact. Discoveries as diverse as dark matter to continental drift, technologies from solar panels to the steam engine; artists from Back to Brueghel, Vermeer to Melville all were 'sleeping beauties'. Why did they fall asleep? How did they wake up? Ranging across many centuries and the full scope of human endeavour, Byrne arrives at some important conclusions which in sum give us a lens for bringing to light new seeds for our own future breakthroughs. Humbling yet hopeful, these stories add up to a compass that leads us to the courage to try new things and the wisdom to embrace them. In a time that can seem all too dark, it's a powerful source of freely available light, delightful in itself and fit for all our human endeavours. Art History History & Philosophy Science
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Critic reviews

Praise for How Music Works: 'Can alter how we look at ourselves and the world'
Brilliantly original
It was wildly ambitious to try and turn this galaxy of theory into a readable work of scholarship but Byrne has done it, and done it with style. Brian Eno might as well cancel that book deal now
An entertaining and erudite book . . . this is a serious, straight-forward account of an art from that also manages to be inspiring
Given the vastness of the subject, calling a treatise How Music Works seems intellectually arrogant, but it could also be seen as disarmingly frank, a fresh perspective from a down-to-earth mind. David Byrne's book, although a self-conscious art object (backwards pagination, upholstered cover and so on) contains plenty of plain-spoken, sensible observations: a dichotomy typical of the man
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