Michael Howe, in his dual role as Professor of Psychology and historian, has written an enjoyable and informative book. He presents down-to-earth summaries of the development of his chosen geniuses within the contexts of their times: essential because they are all dead. His insights are thought-provoking, such as the reasonable possibility that it may not have been Mozart who wrote down his earliest compositions, but his devoted father.

Context matters. In Catherine Cox’s 1926, The Early Mental Traits of Three Hundred Geniuses, her subjects were virtually all men. The progress of women since then has altered the genius bank. Yet Howe repeats that Pierre Curie was already a prominent physicist when he married Marie Curie, though in fact, they were both outsiders. Pierre, though, was eventually able to join important societies and make better career progress because of his gender. Marie barely made her Nobel prize because it was assumed in France at that time that she could only be her husband’s handmaiden. Even her second Nobel prize after his death was brushed aside by the French scientific establishment because she was involved in a scandale du coeur, unacceptable for a lady. Howe’s women geniuses are George Eliot and the Bronté sisters.

The lives of this sample are nicely compared, as in Charles Darwin’s doctor father, Robert, earning in a day what George Stephenson’s miner father, also Robert, earned in a year. Charles had everything money could buy, including that famous five-year trip to the Galapagos. Did the Stephensons really share a single room in a cottage with three other families, all of whom had many children? Yet it was fortunate for young George and his country that the coal mine wagons ran on rails outside his door. Even though he never sat in a classroom, he not only learned to read words from somewhere but diagrams too. His genius was to enable Britain to run the first railway in the world.

The relationship between precocity and geniuses is well covered. The distinction between childhood productions and those of adults is examined in terms of current expertise theory, the 10 years and 10,000 hours of devoted practice needed to get there. Marie Curie, though, had to condense the time and ration the intensity. As a female, she was forbidden school science in Poland, so for years she saved her small earnings as a provincial governess for later study in Paris. Unlike any of Howe’s subjects, she was also a mother and home-maker.

Whereas in Hans Eysenck’s Genius, he described the condition as largely inborn, Howe suggests there’s nothing special about the mental activities of geniuses. He is keen to demolish the idea of genius as “a mysterious and mystical gift”, but rather is due to a “combination of environment, personality and sheer hard work”. The presence of a mentor also seems to provide a vital lift. This argument, worked through the case histories, is not only impressive but encouraging, opening the way up to all of us and our children. But what about those who fit the pattern and never make it, either in this life or after, those who obsessively devote their lives to dozens of rejected manuscripts.

The effective education of all these geniuses is pointed out, such as Michael Faraday’s, the discoverer of electro magnetic induction, who was apprenticed to a book binder and so had access to far more information than any schoolboy. Einstein’s cultured home, though, was no different from thousands of others of that time. He learned a lot of Latin and Greek at school and entered the Zurich Polytechnic a year early, but in spite of his outstanding results no professional would help him, due either to his self-confidence or his Jewishness. It was Albert himself who turned his clerking job at the patent’s office to his own advantage. Explaining his astonishing ascent in physics as due to environmental influences, even including Uncle Jakob, is unconvincing.

Schools do not come out of these histories well. It may be different today. Yet special education for gifted children has been in action now for about 70 years, involving many many thousands of youngsters and costing millions of dollars. It is unknown whether a single genius has graduated from them.

Is there no genius breathing the air right now? Asking around who is considered a living genius, my mini-survey produced only Bill Gates, though his star has rather fallen of late. Scientific creativity nowadays is so often teamwork that apart from defined prize-winners, co-operation mitigates against the old-fashioned solo genius.

William Sidis, as is well known, amounted to very little in the end. He seems to have been a disturbed youth, which Howe ascribes to his father’s insensitivity and dominance. How strange, then that Norbert Wiener, who had an extremely similar upbringing was entirely successful. Could it be that he had different genes? Howe skates lightly over the non-genius siblings who shared the environment.

So many psychologists disagree with Howe’s view of the negligible effects of genes in genius that he resembles the people he describes, ploughing his lonely furrow over many years. The majority view of genetic influences has, he believes, “damaging consequences to immense numbers of young people.” (p.22). He dismisses the evidence from the separated-twin studies in a few sentences.

If you are interested in people then these life histories will intrigue you, though his thesis is not so much Genius Explained as Genius Explained Away. I read nothing of the spark, the pizzazz, that turns the humdrum novelist into a Dickens or the back row cellist into a Yo Yo Ma: no amount of diligent practice can make the heart of the listener leap. Howe’s description of the genius’s mental processes as “broadly” the same as those of non-geniuses perhaps provides the clue. They are not actually the same and it is the difference that we admire. Vive la difference.

Joan Freeman