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Beyond the Stereotypes
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12753 |
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BOOK WORLD
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3 / 1987 |
3,148 Words |
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John Briggs
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NATURE'S GAMBIT
Child Prodigies and the Development of Human Potential
David Henry Feldman with Lynn T. Goldsmith
Basic Books, 1986
304 pp., $19.95
CONCEPTIONS OF GIFTEDNESS
Robert J. Sternberg and Janet Davidson
Cambridge University Press, 1986
460 pp., $29.25
THE PRODIGY
Amy Wallace Dutton
1986
297 pp., $18.95
For ages, child prodigies have excited awe, envy, titillation, and sometimes fear; journalistic reports of prodigies have abounded, yet surprisingly little has been done to study them scientifically. David Feldman's engaging account of his ten-year project to track the development of six prodigies is therefore an exciting and long-awaited contribution to understanding the ultimate "gifted child."
Similar praise is due the Sternberg-Davidson collection of eighteen articles by leading giftedness researchers. Together, these books point toward a new realism in the debate about the factors involved in the emergence and cultivation of extraordinary talent. Amy Wallace's slickly written journalistic biography of early twentieth-century American prodigy William James Sidis is of lesser note. It is short on insight and woefully remiss in documenting its sources, but it also adds impetus toward a less circus-like view of mental prodigiousness.
The group of prodigies studied by Feldman, who is professor and cochairman of the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study at Tufts University, included a boy who could speak nine languages and do Egyptian hieroglyphic by the time he was four, child chess masters, a musical prodigy who was composing symphonies before he was eight, a seven-year-old who spent his days doing higher mathematics and reading about quarks, and a boy who taught himself how to type at two and a half because he felt compelled to fill blank sheets with stories and poems.
Co-incidence
Feldman has concluded from his observations that prodigies appear only if there is a remarkable coalescence of forces, a "co-incidence," as he terms it. The prodigy's extraordinary and usually quite specialized ability - like violin playing, chess, or mapmaking - is like an ember that must land in just the right environment in order to burst into flame. A computer prodigy born in a culture where there are no computers or a musical prodigy born into a family where music is forbidden are like sparks falling into a desert. Nature strikes off these strange sparks as part of its continuous gamble for adaptation. Individuals able to master complex and specialized cultural fields quickly create an evolutionary advantage, Feldman believes. Most often the gambit fails, and the prodigy is "lost" because the spark finds no tinder.
An interesting instance of the delicacy of
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