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Thinking Places: Where Great Ideas Were Born

by Carolyn Fleming and Jack Fleming; Foreword by Elliot Engel

398 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #07-0862; ISBN 1-4251-2585-9; US$27.95, C$32.14, EUR21.79, £14.45

Thinking Places is a literary travel book with tales of many journeys and fresh insights into the lives of thirty-one creative people and the private retreats or pathways used in their work.

About the Book

For centuries creative people in all fields have had a thinking place - a private retreat where they have worked regularly, hoping to find inspiration. The authors have chosen thirty-one creative people who vaulted from their thinking places to well-deserved fame or international recognition. These special retreats varied from architectural jewels to humble huts to chosen sites in nature itself. George Bernard Shaw's was a simple garden hut with one window and one door - and a turntable underneath. Shaw captured the prevailing sunlight with a push and a turn.

In their journeys, Carolyn and Jack Fleming discovered that many thinking places still seem to exude an atmosphere of creativity. The Flemings have recorded the details of their searches for you, the reader to duplicate - in reality or in imagination. In their travels the authors discovered much little known information, which they have included in sprightly written vignettes. What was Charles Dickens' long kept secret? What beloved figure did Life magazine proclaim "the unofficial president of the United States"? Who received what the U.S. Patent office states is the most valuable patent ever issued? What two leading educators rose from slavery and extreme poverty to world-wide fame? The reader will discover that the thirty-one people selected were as intriguing as they were creative.

Besides descriptive journeys, vignettes and thinking places, the reader will also receive thirty-one instances of lagniappe, a Cajun word for "a little something extra". Read Thinking Places and see what something extra may be in store for you.

About the Author

Carolyn Fleming is the author of a novel, Journey Proud, set in Georgia in 1933; a cookbook, Pensacola Holidays, published in two editions; and Democracy Means Sharing, a collection of essays about the American Jury System and about serving as the foreman of a Federal Grand Jury during America's Bicentennial. (The judge sent it to all the U.S. Supreme Court members where it probably became the first book so accredited that contained a few recipes by jury members.)

Jack Fleming, a cardiologist for over four decades, is the author of A Primer on Common Functional Disorders about psychosomatic illnesses; and co-editor of a textbook on nuclear cardiology, as well as many cardiology research articles and essays. A singer, he has written many ballads and other lyrics, including "Down on the Natchez Trace" and "Hitch Up Your Hippocampus".

The authors' first collaboration was the book and lyrics, with composer, Allen Pote, for the full-length musical, SEAPLANE about early flight.(For this the trio received honorary citizenship in Hammondsport, New York, the birthplace of Glenn Curtiss, one of the heroes of SEAPLANE). The musical played at the Kennedy Center. Fleming-Pote followed this with a musical-whimsical for children, entitled, Imagination, inspired by the life of Robert Louis Stevenson in the South Pacific. Excerpts have played in Samoa where the authors made four visits. Other musicals include Bahia de Panzacola and Doctors with H'Art.

The Flemings received jointly the Doctorate of Humane Letters by The University of West Florida. They also received The Adelia Rosasco Soule Award for Literary Distinction and a special medal by The City of Pensacola-Escambia County.

The result of the collaboration that the authors cherish most is their family.