This book spoke to me. As an author, I am always looking to improve my craft, and could relate to Gallo’s intuitive preface statement: “Ideas are the currency of the twenty-first century. In the information age, the knowledge economy, you are only as valuable as your ideas. Story is the means by which we transfer those ideas to one another.” Powerful words.
In this book, Gallo describes the lives of fifty people who changed, motivated, or educated the world through the art of storytelling. He also shares the tools of storytelling, like using analogy and personal stories. In so doing, I couldn’t help noticing that Gallo is the storyteller here, eloquently telling us each person’s story, and in the process giving us a glimpse of how this vastly important topic has touched lives over the centuries. Writing about ancient Greece, 2,500 years ago, with Georgias teaching rhetoric, to Bill Gates drinking sanitized poop, Gallo covered several different time periods and cultures, catching my interest.
This book motivated me because it provided tools that could be relevant to my writing as well as to speaking, like using emotion and humor in storytelling. Gallo also backs up his statements with studies by psychologists, which I appreciate. For example, Paul Zak, professor at Claremont Graduate University, along with his team, found that character-driven stories raised the oxytocin level in the brain. Oxytocin is known to enhance one’s sense of empathy to another person.
I particularly liked the check list in the back that is a useful guide. I will try and share it with my writers’ group. I also appreciated the references listed in the back, which I could turn to for further reading.
I will be reading this book over and over again. Well written, it captured my imagination, my emotion, and my interest! I will look for more books written by this author.