A Personal Review: Paul King [August 2016]
In some ways, the narratives of gifted individuals, exposing the impact of gifted identification on their cognitive, social, and emotional development, is applicable to the reader who is identified as intelligent. This should encompass a wide swath of the general population since most of us have been cited for some intuitive or reflected insights during our adult years. Although there is a qualitative leap – or as one writer observed, a standard deviation distinguishing the gifted from the intelligent – being identified as intelligent dramatizes challenges and draws doubts about the validity of the ascribed expectations or perceptions of others. Thus, reading the fifteen cases was both an exercise in external knowledge acquisition and reflective self-knowledge.
There is one sharp distinction between 'gifted cultural minorities' who are Black, Hispanic or Indian and 'gifted' or 'brainy' Jews. The former are visible minorities, whereas the latter have been teasingly identified as the audible minority. Accompanying stereotypes sharply contrast – Blacks, Hispanics (less so, Indians and Chinese) are stereotyped as inferior in intelligence, whereas Jews are stereotypes as clever, people of the Book, and thus learned or cliquish and thus privy to esoteric knowledge. My childhood was lived in a rather homogenous WASP setting with a small Catholic minority separated from others by their faith and separate school system, as well as by social discrimination. As a Jew, I did not sense an undue degree of exclusion. Thus, this book brought me face to face with an unencountered other.
By and large the text seems intelligible to the reader uninitiated in literature about the gifted. However, there were some principal contrasts which required unpacking. "Culturally diverse gifted child and the lack of environmental diversity from which the child emerges" is somewhat opaque. What is the nature of this heterogeneity which is in conflict with its situational homogeneity? Does the gifted child have a broader expanse of interests and skills? Are there categories of giftedness, as suggested on p. xxxi, which comprise the term 'culturally diverse'? The recurrence of the phrase 'the comfort zone', which is not a part of this reviewer's lingo, seems either to be a buzz word or a technical term. Are gifted children more aware of their comfort zone than the average child?
There are several lacunae which beg insertion. What is the impact on the gifted child of parental divorce and single-mother upbringing. Literature on the absent father is not lacking. Perhaps there was a reluctance to penetrate all the concentric circles of privacy. The book would have benefited from a summary and conclusion, drawing out some commonalities and challenges calling for future exploration and research. Nevertheless, this is a rich collection of gifted voices, acknowledging, struggling with, sharing and contributing their gifts for their own self-development and the development of the communities of their choice.
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