A review by caffeinecrow
The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield

0.5

This isn’t so much a book as it is some 165 pages of half connected musings from someone who thinks he knows more than he does. It reads as though Jordan Peterson decided to try and write about “art” instead of general life rules. Not that Steve manages to write about art until around halfway through the book. The first “book”/section is about procrastination, but Steve, as he will do with many terms in this book, decides to call procrastination “resistance” to sound more profound than he really is. Towards the end of the book there’s multiple pages of determinist rhetoric, claiming that we all have a set “purpose”, personality, and job in this world that we can’t change, and that we only have one and no more, which is just wrong. He also really doesn’t like sex work or sex workers, to the point where condemnations of them appear three times in this book that is allegedly about art. If I could add a warning for anti-sex worker sentiment I would. He also calls ADD/ADHD, Social Anxiety Disorder, and Seasonal Affective Disorder, ‘manifestations of resistance’ and basically argues that the pharmaceutical industry made them up to sell drugs. More so than anything, he does something that I as an artist hate: he mythologizes the craft, going on and on about muses, saying one must have whispered in Beethoven’s ear a few bars of a symphony before he composed it. This is the kind of thinking that holds beginner artists of many sorts back, thinking there’s some divine, arcane, or otherwise magical element they haven’t tapped into that will take care of the hard work. Ironically, there are many parts of the book where Steve does say that a large part of art is sitting down and going at it persistently (though I would say to an unhealthy degree — if your wife is going into labor you need to put down the laptop and go help her), but that true message is undermined by the mythologizing. There is as much and as little magic in art and writing as there is in plumbing, carpentry, accounting, and all other professions and hobbies. I was going to give this one star, and then it turned out worse than the other book I gave one star this year. At least that one stayed on subject and didn’t decide to randomly say ADHD social anxiety and Seasonal Affective Disorder are all fake. There’s probably more I could dissect, but I would like to move on and read a better book now. If you would like a better and more helpful book about art, I would recommend Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon. 
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