Genie: a Scientific Tragedy (Paperback)

~ Russ Rymer (Author) "Sometime in the late seventh century B.C., it occurred to Psamtik I, the first of the Saitic kings of Egypt, to wonder which might be..." (more)
Key Phrases: potty chair, Los Angeles, David Rigler, Susan Curtiss (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Permanently strapped to a chair by her deranged father, Genie (a pseudonym) spent her entire childhood in the closed room of a virtually silent house in suburban California. When her nearly blind mother dragged her into a Los Angeles welfare office in 1970, the emaciated teenager could barely speak. Bounced back and forth between foster parents, institutions and her biological mother (her father fatally shot himself in 1970), Genie improved her linguistic skills but ultimately proved unable to master the rudiments of language. Basing this searing, tragic account on an article he wrote for the New Yorker, Rymer tells how linguists and psychologists, eager to test their theories, competed for access to Genie, who now lives in a home for retarded adults, hidden away from researchers by her mother. Rymer suggests that scientists and caretakers treated Genie as a "wild child" instead of giving her supportive therapy that might have enabled her to overcome the confining horrors of her childhood.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

This is the true story of Genie, whose mentally unbalanced father tied her to a potty chair and left her alone in her room. Because of this abuse, Genie lacked language and social skills, and she thereby became a pawn in the great debate over language acquisition. Rymer here presents a fascinating look at a child's abuse and the failure of the scientific community to help her achieve some normalcy. Describing her history and the various tests and studies performed on her, he show how Genie ended up as just another case study. Unfortunately, scientists considered Genie a unique opportunity to study language skills and acquisition rather than a bewildered child who desperately needed help. Recommended for academic and larger public libraries.
- Jennifer Langlois, Missouri Western State Coll. Lib., St. Joseph
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Harper Paperbacks (January 12, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060924659
• ISBN-13: 978-0060924652
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #37,462 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

56 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Modern Tragedy, November 24, 2001

By	Rivkah Maccaby "Rivkah Maccaby" (Bloomington, IN United States) - See all my reviews

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.

26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Psycholinguistic issues meet scientific ethics, November 12, 1997

By	[e-mail] (London, UK) - See all my reviews

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.

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, July 21, 2002

By	Peter F. Stubbs (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.