|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Beyond the Stereotypes
| Article
# : |
12753 |
|
|
Section : |
BOOK WORLD
|
| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1987 |
3,148 Words |
| Author
: |
John Briggs
John Briggs, a widely published science writer, is the author
of Fire in the Crucible, a book on creative genius to be
published by St. Martin's Press this coming spring. He teaches
at the New School for Social Research. |
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
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
