Customer Reviews

The Social and Emotional Lives of Gifted Kids: Understanding and Guiding Their Development

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I highly recommend this book by Tracy Cross which which is very insightful and illuminating. Cross is a valuable educator with thoughtful analyses and reading his book has taught me a lot as a gifted educator from Turkey.

This is a compilation of the author's columns from the education journal "Gifted Child Today", a publication which seems to be targeted to teachers and administrators. Much of the book is presented in the form of lists, which look like bullets of powerpoint slides. Perhaps because the chapters are just reprints of the columns, no chapter seems to go in to any depth. Almost all of the material deals with the gifted child in the context of public schools.

The cover blurb states the the book offers the tools need to "understand your gifted child", "support your child's talents", "guild their development" and "encourage their success and happiness". I didn't see much of this in the book, other than a suggestion that your child might appreciate an e-mail account to correspond with children he or she met at camp. (Duh!) I did see quite about about how people of typical intelligence see gifted people, for instance, the story of the reporter who thought that perhaps the Unabomber came to commit his crimes because he was grade skipped! But, what I was really hoping for was more insight into the my child's thinking and feeling, perhaps an improved and updated version of Alice Millers "The Drama of the Gifted Child". This book wasn't even close.