The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World

The Gift first appeared in 1983 to immediate acclaim and lasting popularity. Despite the praise, I avoided it for years because I thought it was a long-winded version of those insipid inspirational posters of sunsets and kittens that used to hang on office walls. Not the first time I’ve been wrong. It is in fact is a rigorously intellectual, approachably written combination of history, psychology, ethnology, economics, poetry, personal anecdote, and self-help manual. The Gift is about a lot of things, but the primary question it asks is how creativity can be expressed in a society like ours, where the value of art is assigned in such unpredictable ways. Take Van Gogh, who sold only a single painting for a pittance while he was alive, but whose collected output might now fetch over a billion dollars at auction. Hyde suggests an alternative framework based not on commodity but free exchange without obligation, a framework that supports self-expression regardless of the world's response. He’s not advocating some loose, neo-hippie ideology where we burn all money, just distinguishing between different kinds of value. His book amply rewards any reader in search of a mindful life. —James (from the Madison Books newsletter)