Off the Charts: The Hidden Lives and Lessons of American Child Prodigies by Ann

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Ann Hulbert's in-depth exploration of the lives of sixteen extraordinary children over the course of the past century casts new light on America's current obsession with early achievement. The figures she profiles include math genius Norbert Wiener, founder of cybernetics; two girls whose fiction and poetry stirred debate in the 1920s; the movie superstar Shirley Temple; the African-American pianist and composer Philippa Schuyler; the chess champion Bobby Fischer; computer pioneers and "prodigious savants" with autism; and musical prodigies, present and past. Hulbert probes the changing roles of parents and teachers as well as of psychologists and a curious press. Above all, she delves into the feelings of the prodigies themselves, whose stories so intriguingly raise hopes about untapped human potential and questions about how best to nurture it.

FORMATPaperback LANGUAGEEnglish CONDITIONBrand New Author Biography

ANN HULBERT is the author of Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children and The Interior Castle: The Art and Life of Jean Stafford. Her articles and reviews have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, and The Atlantic, where she is the literary editor. She is a graduate of Harvard and spent a year at Cambridge University. She lives with her husband in Washington, D.C.

Review

"Compelling. . . . Child prodigies have always been fascinating [and] today their lives resonate with special force." —The Washington Post"Part ode to young genius, part indictment of helicopter parenting, Hulbert's crisply written account of überachieving kids probes our own complicated obsessions with talent and the need to stand out." —O, The Oprah Magazine"Engaging and insightful. . . . Hulbert approaches her dozen or so subjects not as a social scientist but as biographer and essayist, where her skills are superlative." —The Wall Street Journal"A profound, sensitive look at what it takes to make a child prodigy, and the unexpected ways that brilliance can play out in the long run." —The Saturday Evening Post"What can we learn, in a society dedicated to high-achieving children, from children who seem 'naturally' off the charts in their achievements? . . . [Hulbert] does the good work, throughout, of resisting morals or too neat generalizations." —Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker"Captures the complicated lives of child prodigies without descending into voyeurism or caricature. [Hulbert] has tried to 'listen hard for the prodigies' side of the story,' to her great credit." —The New York Times Book Review"Fascinating if at times disturbing. . . . [Hulbert] makes clear, in this nuanced and meticulous book, that when it comes to the prodigy's gift, the peril is indivisible from the glory." —Newsday"In this beautifully written, thoroughly reported look at young 'geniuses,' Hulbert poses fascinating questions about the roles of both genetics and pushy parents." —Booklist (starred review)

Review Quote

"Compelling. . . . Child prodigies have always been fascinating [and] today their lives resonate with special force." -- The Washington Pos t "Part ode to young genius, part indictment of helicopter parenting, Hulbert's crisply written account of

Excerpt from Book

CHAPTER 1 The Wonder Boys of Harvard * 1 * "The first thing my April Fool''s boy wanted from the great outside world was the moon," wrote a young mother named Sarah Sidis, recalling her firstborn''s arrival in the family on the cusp of the twentieth century. We stood at the window of the apartment together in the evening, with Billy in Boris'' arms, and admired the moon over Central Park. Billy chuckled and reached for it. The next night when he found that the moon was not in the same place, he seemed disturbed. Trips to the window became a nightly ritual, and he was always pleased when he could see the "moo-n." This led to Billy''s mastering higher mathematics and planetary revolutions by the time he was eleven, and if that seems to be a ridiculous statement I can only say, "Well, it did." The moon-gazing scene is a classic parental experience, a memory likely to stick, even if it goes unrecorded in a baby book. A brilliant sphere or sliver hangs in the sky. The baby arm reaches out, pointing, and the round eyes are even brighter than usual as they look first at the moon, then into your eyes, then back at the light out there in the darkness. "Moon," you say, a word almost as mesmerizing, in English, as the sight. The tiny lips purse, and out comes a sound that no cow could imitate. "Yes, moon," you say again, and the future seems full of promise for a young soul excited by a new word and fascinated by the view. This baby, who doesn''t want to turn away, will surely go far in life--and in the cool moonglow, you feel thrilled and perhaps also a little terrified at what may be in store for both of you. Sarah Sidis told her unusual version of the story years after the birth on April 1, 1898, of one of the first, and for a time most famous, child prodigies of the modern era. Billy''s full name was William James Sidis, after the renowned Harvard psychologist who was her husband''s mentor and the boy''s godfather. At eleven, enrolled at Harvard, Billy made headlines when he delivered a lecture on the fourth dimension to the university''s Mathematical Club, "with the aid of a crayon which he wielded with his little hand," wrote The New York Times. By then Sarah and her husband, Boris, had made it their mission to jolt turn-of-the-century Americans with a thrilling, and terrifying, message: learning, if it was begun soon enough, could yield phenomenal results very early and rapidly. Russian Jews, they had fled the pogroms in Ukraine for the garment sweatshops on the United States''s East Coast in the mid-1880s. Within ten years they had worked their way to the top of American higher education. Sarah, by 1898 a rare woman with an M.D. (from Boston University School of Medicine), considered her husband "the most brilliant man in the world." After tutoring Sarah, Boris had racked up a B.A., an M.A., and a Ph.D. in psychology at Harvard within four years. But inborn talent had nothing to do with their feats, or their son''s, they insisted: Billy was not miraculous, and Boris''s brilliance was more honed than inherited. (Reared in a polyglot world by a bookish merchant, he had been multilingual and a voracious young reader, who boldly began educating peasants as a teenager--for which he was imprisoned by the tsar.) The long-standing fear that precocity was the prelude to early degeneracy was groundless. An as-yet-unimagined potential lay in every child, and it was time parents started cultivating it, Boris urged. The country, more than ever, needed "the individuality, the originality, the latent powers of talent and genius" too often wasted. Their zeal will sound familiar, echoed by current apostles of the "10,000 hour rule" of "deliberate practice," begun the younger the better. The impatience with low expectations remains a refrain. So does the warning that if we heedlessly neglect childhood opportunities to excel, we''re jeopardizing a valuable national resource. The opposite concern, conveyed by William James in a letter, is alive and well, too. "I congratulate you on W.J.S.--what you tell of him is wonderful," he wrote of his four-year-old godson in 1902. But he was clearly alarmed. "Exercise his motor activities exclusively for many years now! His intellect will take care of itself," he told Boris. Did James realize that the rest of his letter--he cited a Harvard colleague''s prodigious son as a cautionary example--risked egging the Sidises on? That problem is familiar as well. James noted that the university''s first professor of Slavic languages, Leo Wiener--another remarkable émigré from tsarist Russia (he had taken the Bialystok high school entrance exams at ten and knew that many languages by his teens)--was several steps further along with his phenomenal son, Norbert. "Now at the age of seven," James reported, the boy "has done all the common school work, and of course can''t get into the high school, so that his father is perplexed what to do with him, since they make difficulties about admitting him to the manual training schools in Cambridge." Seven years later, when both boys converged on Harvard--there was no stopping the mission--their fathers, with Boris in the lead, had the eye and ear of the public as they sounded a democratic call to Americans to get busy enriching their children''s fast-growing minds. An influx of underage standouts at the nation''s most prestigious university put them all in the spotlight. In the fall of 1909, Norbert, almost fifteen, arrived as a graduate student in zoology after getting his B.A. in math at Tufts in three years. Billy, now known as William, was admitted at eleven as a "special student." They were joined by two children of the Reverend Adolf Berle, an ambitious Congregationalist minister in Boston--Adolf Jr., fourteen, and his sister, Lina, fifteen, at Radcliffe--and a scion of a blue-blooded Boston family, Cedric Houghton, also fifteen. (The following fall, a fourteen-year-old musician named Roger Sessions enrolled.) The two superprecocious sons of the immigrant professor and doctor, outspoken men with bushy mustaches and accents, inspired the most interest--and the most suspense. The world was in ferment, and Harvard along with it. The basic contours of the flux haven''t changed. A new century of global migration and international tensions was under way. The pace of scientific progress had picked up. The fledgling field of psychology was taking off--Freud visited the United States in 1909--and Einstein''s revolutionary papers of 1905 had stirred baffled interest. The arrival of these brilliant boys, with their unusual pedigrees, fit the mission of Harvard''s outgoing president, Charles W. Eliot, a liberal Boston Brahmin and staunch believer in equality of opportunity. He aimed to open university doors to "men with much money, little money, or no money, provided that they all have brains." And not just brains, Eliot warned complacent WASPs, who mistook "an indifferent good-for-nothing, luxurious person, idling through the precious years of college life" for an ideal gentleman or scholar. Eliot had in mind an elite with "the capacity to prove by hard work that they have also the necessary perseverance and endurance." Boris and Leo, more radically egalitarian than Eliot, promised that anyone''s children could soar like their sons--and do so without undue strain, if parents were prompt enough and pursued the right methods. The prospect stirred great interest, but also wariness, on campus and beyond. A. Lawrence Lowell, Eliot''s far stuffier Brahmin successor, was said to worry that the "new immigrants" from Eastern and Southern Europe just didn''t mix well with the "Anglo-Saxon race," whose ascendancy he assumed. "What will become of the wonder child?" asked a New York Times article announcing William''s arrival at Harvard. The attention was tinted with suspicion: "Will he go the way commonly supposed to be that of most boy prodigies," the Times went on, "or will he make a name for himself?" Boris had just given a speech at the Harvard summer school about liberating youthful genius. Norbert''s father was ready with the assurance that his son "was not forced. He is even lazy." For one boy, an embattled and lonely quest for privacy lay ahead. For the other, a formative role in the information age awaited. More emblematic fates for two pioneering modern prodigies would be hard to find--which doesn''t mean that one path is a model and the other neatly conveys a cautionary moral. Both, as the boys understood sooner and better than their fathers did, were minefields. * 2 * "I tried at one time to unite the five of us into a sort of prodigy club, but the attempt was ridiculous for we did not possess a sufficient element of coherence to make a joint social life desirable," Norbert Wiener wrote years later in his memoir Ex-Prodigy. The effort was a valiant, and rather poignant, gesture by a teenager well versed in the struggle to fit in while standing out. In all of our cases, our social relations were better taken care of elsewhere than by a close social contact with those of our own kind. We were not cut from the same piece of cloth, and in general there was nothing except an early development of intelligence that characterized us as a group. And this was no more a basis for social unity than the wearing of glasses or the possession of false teeth. When they arrived on campus in Cambridge, he and William certainly bore no physical resemblance. Round-faced Norbert was a stocky adolescent verging on plump--though he went to the gym every day, an article noted. Short and clumsy and severly myopic, he wore thick wire-rim glasses. There was no disguising that he was a "greasy grind," the collegiate term for scholarly types. But having already graduated t

Details ISBN1101971320 Author Ann Hulbert Short Title OFF THE CHARTS Pages 400 Language English ISBN-10 1101971320 ISBN-13 9781101971321 Format Paperback Year 2019 Publication Date 2019-01-22 Subtitle The Hidden Lives and Lessons of American Child Prodigies Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2019-01-22 NZ Release Date 2019-01-22 US Release Date 2019-01-22 UK Release Date 2019-01-22 Place of Publication New York Publisher Random House USA Inc Imprint Vintage Books DEWEY 371.950973 Audience General We've got this

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