Publishers Weekly
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From Botticelli’s paintings to The Great Gatsby to handwashing, some of humanity’s most important achievements in culture, science, and technology were abandoned and then re-embraced years or sometimes centuries later, explains musician and artist Byrne (How Music Works) in this delightful survey of rediscovered art and ideas. The author begins by recalling his own “revelation” when first encountering and subsequently helping to revive Brazilian Tom Zé’s “radical boundary-pushing music.” Further inspired by a 2004 paper on overlooked scientific ideas that termed them “sleeping beauties,” Byrne surveys such re-emergent artworks and theories, highlighting what drove their revitalization, from passionate individual champions, like Salvador Dalí’s admiration for Gaudí’s architecture, to simple accidents, like Hugo de Vries and Carl Correns “separately and unwittingly” retreading Gregor Mendel’s work on genetics decades later. Along the way, Byrne imparts a contagious enthusiasm for everything from concrete to radio astronomy, bolstered by his quirky sense of humor (on Caravaggio: “Why was he such a crazy asshole?”). The book loses steam as Byrne slows down to list requirements for sleeping beauties (“useful and relevant”; “accessible”) and necessary conditions for their reawakening, like cross-disciplinary collaboration. Still, the cumulative effort wisely counsels against recency bias, as it reveals “how often our opinions and beliefs have changed.” It’s a wonderful and humbling celebration of the lost and found. (Oct.)

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

The former Talking Heads frontman on great art and ideas that missed their moment. In academic literature, a “sleeping beauty” is a research paper that was neglected when it was first published but found relevance later. Pop icon and author Byrne (How Music Works, 2012, etc.) expands the concept by looking for examples not just in science but in literature, music, technology, economics, and more. Though the book is structured as 35 brief histories and biographies, he organizes them around a handful of themes. Sometimes all an artist needs is one spirited advocate (like William Faulkner had in Malcolm Cowley); sometimes a figure needs time to escape their reputation (like the infamously pugnacious Caravaggio); sometimes research needs to catch up with a rejected idea (like continental drift); or sometimes a catastrophe demonstrates an idea’s validity (as financial collapses redeemed the research of neglected economist Hyman Minsky). If music doesn’t pan out for Byrne, he has a viable sideline as a pop-history writer—he has a wry, entertaining, and informed voice whether he’s discussing Vermeer’s paintings or water-management systems in ancient India. His enthusiasm for the subject is consistent throughout, though too often he gooses his prose with exclamation. (“Even the Bard did sequels!...There’s a lot you can do with one chord!...Never underestimate how one might be discovered!”) There’s little autobiographical material here, though an opening chapter about his discovery of the neglected Brazilian musician Tom Zé speaks to his passion, and he plainly did all this homework in the name of boosting creativity. The closing pages advocate for a cosmopolitan, open-minded view of the world that might save good ideas from lying dormant for years, even centuries. An affectionately curated assortment of tales about human ingenuity saved from the dustbin of history. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.