Customer Reviews

Genie: A Scientific Tragedy

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I have worked as an American Sign Language interpreter, and I am also a qualified behavior specialist. I currently work with autistic teenagers in developing community living skills. I have also worked with adults who have grown up in institutions, and have an array of "institutionalized" behaviors. Thus they have become severely impaired in their daily function, when they might have been habilitated to live independently. No matter how many times I see these situations, each one breaks my heart.

So I have more than a passing interest in the subject of this book.

That parents could strap a child to a chair and provide her no social interaction for thirteen years, with no one knowing boggles the mind. The whole family is a tragedy.

Russ Rymer documents Genie's habilitation after she is discovered, and freed from this captivity. She is more than a tragedy to some people, because she is also a scientific curiosity; she presents an opportunity to study a person who, deprived of social contact past the "critical point" in language development, never develops language skills beyond the semantic level.

Everyone wants a piece of her. Linguists want her, social psychologists want her, developmental psychologists want her; each with a different agenda. As for Genie, it is difficult to fathom what she wants. In the immediate present, she has remarkable non-linguistic communicative skills which she seems to possess intuitively. But what are her hopes, her desires for a permanent living arrangement, an education, she can't communicate, or even correctly understand.

It's no good to assume that she would want what a normal child wants. She doesn't respond to affection, doesn't appear to discriminate between people and objects at first.

The story is heart-breaking and fascinating. Rymer's narrative voice is kind and full of compassion for Genie, and although the book is written in a typical third person academic style, sometimes I felt that the narrator was the only one on Genie's side.

When Rymer senses that readers may need background information, he departs from the story for an aside on linguistic theory, or the story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron. He dips into Montaigne, Locke, Descartes and Chomsky, but it is all relevant as Rymer reports it. We get the dirt on the nasty in-fighting among custodians and scientists as well.

I hesitate to say you will enjoy this book, because the subject is so wrenching; you may cry a few times. But it is a page turner. And you don't need to know anything about linguistics or developmental psychology to appreciate it.

Rymer offers a journalistic account of one of the most important events in psycholinguistics: the discovery in 1970 of a 13 year old child (the eponymous Genie) who had been kept in solitary confinement since the age of two by her abusive father. Found shortly after Lenneberg's proposal that there was a "critical period" for language learning, which finished at puberty, she provided a human laboratory to disprove or support theories about child language acquisition. However, Rymer's book does not limit itself to linguistic issues. It is also a blistering attack on the insensitivity and selfishness of the scientific community's treatment of Genie. For a more academic treatment try "Genie: aPsycholinguistic Study of a Modern-Day Wild Child", the doctoral thesis of linguist Susan Curtiss. Of all the researchers who worked with Genie, Curtiss is perhaps the only one whose behaviour was beyond reproach. Her account is thorough, warm-hearted and highly engaging. For a quick introduction to the case, try the transcriptof "Secret of the Wild Child", a PBS broadcast.

I don't have a lot to say that the other reviews haven't addressed, so I'll keep it short.

This is a book about such lofty subjects as neurolinguistics and scientific ethics, yet it remains wonderfully readable to the average (but curious) person. It's a fascinating story (see the other reviews), but Rymer's real achievement here is rendering what could have been dry scientific data interspersed with horrific tales of abuse into a book that at no time exploits its subject for cheap sentimentality. We care about "Genie" because her shot at normal life was twice aborted, not because Rymer simply wants us to.

Recommended to any curious mind.

Mr. Rymer's excellent book brought back an old and very painful memory for me. I am all-too familiar with Genie's tragic story. In 1970, I lived in California where it all took place. I was seventeen at the time, passing through my "hippie" phase much to the chagrin of my long-suffering parents.... We all happened to be watching TV one evening in early November of that year when a somber looking Walter Cronkite reported the tragic particulars of the a terribly abused thirteen year old. We were all shocked and completely emotionally overwhelmed by it.I've NEVER forgotten it. Many years later, I had moved back to my native East coast, finished college and became a free-lance writer. Then in 1994, PBS debuted its emmy award-winning documentary about this subject. It really took me by surprise. At that point, I hadn't thought of Genie for many years, but this heartwrenching expose brought it all back. All I could do is weep....and I'm NOT ashamed to admit that. I resolved, then and there to write something, ANYTHING to HONOR this poor girl (now in her forties, like myself). I am now six years into writing an elegiac work about her life. But its NOT easy . People directly involved with Genie'story have not really wanted to talk about it even though they are heroes to me. On this point, I take strong issue with Mr. Rymer when he seems to imply that these people exploited Genie. They really did the best they could to save her....although it was all in vain. Although I've never met Genie, she nevertheless is very very close to my heart. I will always remember her, and I hope, that her present life, such as it is, has at least some happiness and peace. No one deserves this more.......

This book is an absolute must-read for any pediatrician student or otherwise. It is a fascinating study and yes, a tragedy. Scientific books that are written with such elegant diction is a new idea in American culture, and this is one of them.

Although this is one of the saddest books I've ever read, it's also one of the finest. Genie comes alive as an individual despite the fact that she has no language; the author portrays a unique spirit and yet does a brilliant job of demonstrating how captive that spirit is without expression. The scientific theories at work are well-described, intelligent and thorough without being difficult for the lay reader.

Rymer's book starts off a bit slow and academic-y, but that's really just setting the stage. Over the course of reading, you see and hear Genie's story unfold, and the horror -- and that's what it is -- of her solitary confinement, and the extraordinary deficits it led to, are subtly catalogued. As Evolutionary Psychologists often point out, we are so used to human capacities that we don't notice how easily they are developed in us, and how well they work in day to day life. Genie's uniquely-forged mental organization underscores just how miraculous some of these are, by highlighting tasks she picked up with relative ease (vocabulary), those with less ease (word order), and those she found impossible (real syntax), not to mention her ongoing struggles with social convention.

Rymer's greatest strength here is his impartiality, since the group of scientists studying Genie eventually dissolved into something like factions, and were sued by a bitter former teacher who'd hoped to foster Genie, along with her biological mother. Rymer is painterly in his fleshing out of the various characters, with only Susan Curtiss appearing like the proverbial Saint, and more than a few others clearly motivated as much by the prospect of scientific fame than the ability to heal a profoundly disturbed child.

There are moments in the book where you simply have to put it down; it's too hard to read onward. When you learn that Genie was asked to leave a stable, loving home after four years, and was placed in a bland, strict foster care arrangement, that is bad enough. But when this damaged, language-impaired girl said "I want to go live Marilyn house", meaning back where she was, you realize that her life is a litany of falling through the cracks.

The book will also teach you a lot about the subtleties of language, but that's tangential. Read it for Genie's story, well told.

This books recounts a tragic tale of a girl who lacked verbal contact during her formative years. The author skillfully weaves linguistic research into this story that was very informative. I had no previous knowledge of this area and learned a great deal.

I found this book fascinating and excellently written. Rymer will talk about something, then go off on a tangent that will either serve to explain the main thread of the story, or to put it more into perspective, and then he comes right back. This style continues throughout the book, back and forth like a needle and thread, weaving his story. He vulgarizes well, but I would still recommend this book to any linguist, or anybody interested in cognitive sciences. A very good read

What do you do when you find a girl as abused and isolated as Genie? When a girl has been locked away in solitude for so terrifyingly long - the only life she'd known since birth? When she is physically disabled as a result of her abuse? When she is disturbed beyond comprehension?......Why, make her the subject of linguistic research of course.

I'm a linguist (specialising in children's language and language acquisition) and I've been haunted by Genie since I studied her myself from film footage, Curtis' dissertation, other books, and now Rymer`s book. I will never get over seeing Genie on film. Till the day I die. She was as unfamiliar to human life as an extra terrestrial, a beautiful ghost, `there' but not really `there`.

I felt some strong emotions - I wanted to (and still do) fly to America and look after Genie myself. I wanted to take her away from the research, the tests. I was angry with Curtis for even making research a part of Genie's life - sure Lenneberg, Chomsky and Piaget's theories need exploring, but in a case as extreme as this, who really gives a **** about linguistics? I was angry with Jean Butler for putting her own interests ahead of Genie's and I was furious that Genie had been abused in the first place. As with many people at the time and since, I have been massively affected by her story, and I wasn't even born when she was rescued.

In my `struggle' to deal with my emotions on the subject of Genie, I thought Rymer's book might help me, teach me more about her, give me more detail on her since the 70s, more about her and those around her as PEOPLE.......and help me to grieve.

Sadly, as some linguists did back in the 70s, Rymer doesn't distinguish between Genie's life and linguistic study. You get 4 or 5 chapters on theories and studies which make me sick to the stomach. I'll read those elsewhere, but isn't this supposed to be Genie's story? Isn't that why it's called `Genie' - I don't need chapters on `Victor' from 1800.

You can get most of this information from other sources anyway - there was little revelation in Rymers book for me. There is just so much missing. I have read it twice now and I still have a thousand questions.

And Rymer's experiences are almost as second-hand as mine.

This is a page-turner, but Genie's story is.....