Customer Reviews

The Big Book of Dummies, Rebels and other Geniuses

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My 8-year-old son loves this book. It's a great way of getting a first introduction to some of the great geniuses of our civilization. Each entry is short, funny and informative. You can't go wrong with this one!

it's flawed. The basic premise is cool: take a handful of geniuses, those who lived at evolution's edge, and note in brief bios that each was considered less-than-stellar in youth--failure, misfit, rebel or slow student. The reader is free to draw her own conclusions, and I dug the editorial slant--that these are competitive times--my read, that societal recognition goes most easily to those of "optimal" intelligence, neither too high nor too low, who tend to be competitive, short-term, and insecure. (Just attended a wedding of MBAs, and the groomsmen muscled me--mommy holding thirsty toddler, waiting for water--out of line at the bar to get their gin; such is life.)

However, I am made uneasy by an (ironic) implicit equivalence the book seems to make. I worry that the average browser will look at the cover (Einstein sticking out his tongue), skim the bios that read like Internet research conducted over lunch breaks, absorb cheesy prose (maybe it sounded better in the French) and slacker-doodle illustrations--and then--equate the intense and joyful work, the difficult pleasures of the genius (too different, too far ahead of the curve, unusual in temperament, too sensitive, impatient with authority and convention, who values play and risk-taking) with a celebration of the merely sloppy and irreverant.