I had high hopes for this book, but I found it a little like I find meringue: too sweet, with a lot of volume and not much substance.

Too sweet
The overall tone is one of human triumphalism. Isn't it wonderful that we're such a creative, imaginative species? And while I recognize that I may be unduly influenced by the time in which I read this, whatever it is that makes humans different from other species has also made us the most destructive inhabitants of the planet. There's little acknowledgement of that fact, or consideration of how to address it.

With a lot of volume
By weight of ink, this book is overwhelmingly examples. Sometimes those examples appear in single sentence lists: "Synthetic biologist, app developer, self-driving car designer, quantum computer designer, multimedia engineer..." or "...we wouldn't have sonnets, helicopters, pogo sticks, jazz, taco stands, flags, kaleidoscopes, confetti or mixed drinks."

But also the repetition comes in the structure of the book. There are three chapters devoted one each to the ideas of bending, breaking and blending. The idea itself takes a sentence or two to describe. The rest of the chapter are made up of examples.

That pattern of one simple idea, reinforced by (too) many examples, applies to most of the other chapters as well.

Not much substance
I think I could summarize the book thusly without being terribly unfair:

Humans are uniquely capable of imaginative creativity because our brains have evolved to seek out novelty. We can classify all human creativity into three practices: bending things we know in novel directions, breaking things we know into constituent parts and reassembling the parts into something novel, and blending two different things that we know into a novel thing. What we create must be genuinely novel, but not too novel or it won't be culturally acceptable.

If we want to encourage creativity, we need to create environments in which those practices can be effective. And we can do so in business and in school."

Bend, break and blend is the core of the book, but at least as presented it's really just a conceptual framework. Maybe it has a neurophysiological basis, but if so it's not described. Maybe we really can capture all of human creativity with those three words, but there's no real effort to support that conclusion.

So by the end of the book, besides being irritated by the authors' prolix prose, I was left feeling like I hadn't learned anything particularly new.