Customer Reviews

Greatness: Who Makes History and Why

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I must say that this is one of the best psychology textbooks that I own. While most of them sit on a shelf, only to be picked up occasionally for reference, Dr. Simonton's book is one that I've read a number of times... and I'm not even a psychologist.

It is written in a style that is both entertaining and informative and the progression of topics is perfect. The book satisfies the universal interest we have in those who are great, those who can be and those who could have been.

I am most impressed with the statistics and tables that he presents. Even if you like to just "look at the pictures," they still convey the most interesting things.

It has provided me with hours of conversation which is a definitive way to judge a non-fiction book. The best ones are those that you think and talk about.

...GREATNESS ofcourse. The back cover (of the edition I read) contains a comment which alludes to this being a "ground-breaking" work. With all due respect I don't think it is. Simonton obviously knows his stuff and anyone reading this book will benefit from his extensive knowledge on topics from ancient philosophy to modern substance abuse. What the book does provide is an expansive overview of the subject (greatness/psychology) and the first half of the book I could not put down. After a while however one tires of reading about American presidents ad nauseaum and realizes that although Simonton presents a lot of supporting evidence and draws much on source materials he lacks direction and pulls his punches. His value judgments and observations although not obtrusive sometimes lack the insight to be truly "great". The conclusion is particularly lack-lustre. I admire what Simonton has done and written and admit to having learnt much from this book. To the general reader it does offer a good background knowledge of psychology (more so than history) but in the end lacks any profundity. Perhaps this is not the fault of Simonton at all, the subject matter precludes hard and fast conclusions. This book is worth a read and can at times be very inspiring, it's not however the final word yet.

Simonton's book is bound to overwhelm you. There is so much information packed into this tome that I found myself jumping from chapter to chapter. But a lot of this is fascinating. If you want to know about the correlation between intelligence and productivity or birth order and greatness, you can find it here. There is a treasury of great anecdotes about great people (my favorite is Brahms's comment about treading in the footsteps of a giant--Beethoven), and the book is a fast read (page-by-page that is--it's quite a lengthy book).

The drawback of the work is that it may lead you to think that we can really know what greatness is. Simonton has done his research and offers many arguments along these lines, but I couldn't help feeling at the end of it, that though I had a better understanding of different aspects of greatness--intelligence, productivity, charisma etc.--it wasn't entirely clear how they fit together in the form of an individual. There is still no sure way (and there will probably never be) of knowing beforehand whether someone will be great. Greatness cannot be made with any amount of certainty, even if we have all the ingredients (which we don't). Luck and contingency play too large a role.

Nevertheless this is a fun read and you can learn a lot!

This book is highly-recommended reading for parents. This helps parents realize what it takes to be a genius. The wide array of topics, fields covered is nothing short of amazing.

It is certain Dr.Simonton did lot of research to get this whole thing done.

My hero in this whole book is Mathematician: Galois, who did some very important work on Algebra the night before his death-duel. I felt the author should have eloborated his life more. Galois is real inspiration for me.

I have to say I am very touched by some of the contents in the book. Especially, the eccentricities of Cavendish.

Ofcourse, who can forget the funny story about the circumstances under Einstein got Ph.D From U Of Zurich.

Most importantly, I got excellant education in world history for few dollars. Now, I made it a point to read all of his books.

Thanks for reading

---Radhe

Table of Contents
1 Prologue: The Psychologist Confronts Greatness 1
2 Birthrights and Birthmarks: Psychobiological Explanations 9
3 Acts, Affects, and Thoughts: Learning-Based and Cognitive Theories 50
4 The Creative Quest 84
5 The Drive to Succeed 123
6 Infants, Children, and Teenagers: The Famous in Their Youth 142
7 Life's Prime and Death's Advance: A Life-Span Perspective 180
8 The Importance of Intelligence 216
9 The Importance of Personality 247
10 The Significance of Psychopathology 284
11 Violence as a Shaper of History 312
12 The Influence of Attitudes and Beliefs 339
13 Imitation, Affiliation, Group Dynamics, and Leadership 375
14 Epilogue: Has the Psychologist Succeeded? 413
Notes 423
References 445
Subject Index 491

This broad and mediocre survey of psychology of people who stand out in history probably contains a fair number of good ideas, but it's hard to separate them from the many ideas that are questionable guesses. He's inconsistent about distinguishing his guesses from claims backed by good evidence.

One of the clearest examples is his assertion that childhood adversity builds character. He presents evidence that eminent figures were unusually likely to have had a parent die early, and describes this as the "most impressive proof" of his claim. He ignores the possibility those people come from families with a pattern of taking sufficiently unusual risks to explain that evidence.

In other places, he makes mistakes which seemed reasonable when the book was published, such as "Mendelian laws of inheritance are blind to whether an individual is first-born or later-born" (parental age has a measurable effect on mutation rates).

He avoids some of the worst mistakes that a psychology of history could make, such as trying to psychoanalyze individuals without having enough information about them.

He mentions some approaches to analyzing presidential addresses and corporate letters to stockholders, which have some potential to be used in predicting whether leaders have the appropriate personality for their jobs. I wonder what would happen if many voters/stockholders demanded that leaders pass tests of this nature (I'm assuming the tests can be scored objectively, but that may be shaky assumption). I'm confident that we'd get leaders with rhetoric that passes those tests. Would that simply mean the leaders change their rhetoric, or would it be hard enough to maintain a mismatch between rhetoric and thought patterns that we'd get leaders with better thought patterns?

This is a good in-depth overview of why some people become great, but only from a psychological perspective. The book is 15 years old so it is also getting dated since the book is referencing a lot of research. Still worh reading if you are interested in the subject.

With psychological perspective I mean that the book is somewhat narrow. It does not deal with social networks and how a network can lift an individual. It does not deal with luck or interaction between personal traits and situation. This is a major weakness to understand greatness, but one book cannot cover it all. Still I would have been more comfortable if the author himsel was aware of these limitations.

This book is pretty interesting for a very dry academic study... if that makes any kind of sense at all. If you are interested in background information of the great, the Nature vs. Nurture questions involved,enviornment personality type birth order etc., then you might enjoy this Tome. Not enjoyable light reading by any means, but it does site some very interesting and diverse views and theories. However if the subject is of interest to you, you might read this in tandem with Orson Scott Card's "Pastwatch", or "Enders Shadow", as well as C.J. Cherryh's Cyteen. These are the stories that brought me to the interest of the study that Dr. Simonton investigates here. But you'd have to be a lot smarter than me to read it for fun. The TV series Malcolm in the Middle gives a much more entertaining look at the subject, and if you are an academic that doesn't understand the correlation, then, that is a show you should watch from the Pilot episode to the Finale.

This book is tenuously outdated. Several arguments in here are completely invalid thanks to studies done since the book was written. As a side step to this, the author proves a point with generally enough data and then shows the other side to the argument. But, by doing this he realizes that there isn't enough data or by showing both sides to the argument he has just made the argument invalid. He also does not distribute enough empirical data about the assumptions he has made about psychology.

Overall I thought this was an OK text book, but I don't agree with a lot of the things said.