Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for this ARC in exchange of my modest review.

This was a scholar memoir and not a very personal intimate autobiography because Howard Gardner as he said led a life of the mind.
I learnt about The Theory of Multiple Intellingences or about Howard Gardner when I took a class of Psycho - Cognitive, I also discovered Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky. I loved that class and I took great pleasure while doing the assignments that the teacher gave out.

This book was an ocean of information about multiple things. I don't know how I could review such an amazing book and mainly such a great academic researcher and scholar. There are so many teachers that I would like them to read this book for many "reasons".

In this memoir, H.Gardner introduced his family, who escaped the Nazy Germany and led a new life in America then he starts to speak about his education, his academic life, and how he became a researcher and then how he developed his famous theory and about his Synthesizing mind. We also learn about his mentors, the people who inspired him in his ways of thinking and researching. Like Edmund Wilson who as he said wrote elegantly and Richard Hofstadter who wrote powerfully, his authorial heroes, also Erik Erikson. He wrote about how he enjoyed his college years and about Harvard and (Soc Rel) Social Relations department and how it affected him because he mentioned it several times.

I loved this :
" We remain broad synthesizers in a world of disciplinarians, all too often very narrow ones."

He was a mentee that any mentor would dream about for his love of learning that new no limits.

"My unquenchable thirst for knowledge - a feature, indeed a gift, dating back to my earliest childhood - put me in good stead."

But he also faced some incidents like the one with Milgram and we know about this kind of teachers

" I learned in Academia, as in other spheres, you can be attacked without reason and viciously, and you cannot count on others to defend you."

I loved this quote by Nelson Goodman whom he worked with on the Project Zero
"When I read something, as soons as I come to a line that does not make sense, I stop reading."

Also this quote by the renowned British intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin who devided scholars into two types saing; " The fox knows many little things, the hedgehog knows one big thing."

Gardner wrote about how he had benefited, as he said, from the opportunity to emulate particular aspects of particular mentors or as he named it " Fag - mentoring" from great scholars like J. Bruner and so many others.

For Gardner, his only important contribution to the experimental science was his work on the nonliteral language and the brain. He wrote about his success as well as about his failures which led him to the work for which he is best known: The Theory of Multiple Intellingences. He talks about what he faced good or bad after the publication of Frames of Mind and the MI theory. The big attention that it got from all around the world from critics to admirers and fervent believers in his theory. Also, he said that this book has been to provide perspective on the role of MI in his scholarly life.

" I think of myself as a lapsed psychologist, as a systematic social thinker, and above all, as a synthesier of knowledge about human beings and the human mind for most of the rest of the world, I am an educator, or educationalist."

Then Gardner, writes about his book Five Minds and what are explicitly these different minds then he mainly speaks about the synthesizing mind and how synthesizing is based on data and that it occurs across many domains of practice and he explains that synthesis depends crucially on the quality of the questions asked and on the reasons that they are being asked with examples. Through these chapters Gardner shows and explains for us how a synthesizing mind works.

I loved this book and mainly because I was a fan of The M I Theory, I wanted to know who was the great Howard Gardner. This book was inspiring in many ways. How you should believe in what you want to be and how much it's important in anyone's life to be well surrounded. I hope that my humble review will be accepted because who am I to review such an eminent scholar. Thank you for this great opportunity.

When somethign takes a life of its own, it can become a theme of a memoir. This book is mainly about the Multiple intelligences theory and some parts of author's life that led to it.
The introduction is a champ with the current state of authors relegated to one theory but the author has taken a stance on the misuse of theory and even gone deep into the ethical uses of creative ideas.

If you wonder about the person who came up with the wonderful categories of intelligence, you will love this book!! Very interesting man

Though his theories have led to further conversation of late, Howard Gardner presents a story that is remarkably personal in this book.

I enjoyed the nature of A Synthesizing Mind as both a memoir, and as an educational text for sparking discussion. I most appreciate the way Gardner considers self as learner and reflects on his experiences as teacher and learner.

Well worth the read, and recommended for both teachers and students.