The Prodigy

A Biography of William James Sidis, America's Greatest Child Prodigy

De: Amy Wallace

Narrado por: Aze Fellner

William Sidis, 1897-1944, was the world's greatest child prodigy. His IQ was an estiamted 50 to 100 points higher than Einstein's, the highest ever recorded or estimated. His father, a pioneer in the field of abnormal psychology, believed that he and his wife could create a genius in the cradle. They hung alphabet blocks over the baby's crib-and within six months little Billy was speaking. At 18 months he was reading The New York Times; at three, Homer in the original Greek. At six he spoke at least seven languages.

Told with flair and insight ... this is his story.

©1986, 2011 Amy Wallace (P)2011 David N. Wilson

good listen

very interesting story . a story of a child prodigy brought down by media. it

Well written...

...but repetitive in places. It was clear to me that WJ Sidis was a genius, but also had a high functioning form of Autism. This book would have better served to have at least included this as a possibility, especially in the epilogue when the author explored the real reasons for his misunderstood life. It would have been interesting had he been born into today's world. The unfortunate thing would have been in today's nationalism and prejudice, he may have been treated much the same way. Today too is the tendency for a conservative nationalistic trend to denigrate intellectualism, just as Billy experienced in his time. He would have been a great person to know.

A tarnished national treasure lost forever

Where does The Prodigy rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

Among biographies, this book ranks highly and is very thorough in its treatment of the subject. A very worthwhile listen and the best that I've heard this year.

What was the most compelling aspect of this narrative?

The relationship with his sister Helena was perhaps the most uplifting as she was the one person in the family who never turned her back on her brother.

What does Aze Fellner bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

He does a very good job of keeping the listener enthralled throughout the telling of the story. There are only two small slips of the audio whereby a sentence is repeated twice.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

The book kept me captivated throughout and also served as a cautionary tale for me as a father.

Any additional comments?

The author is almost completely silent on why the father was never mentioned again, either positively or negatively after his passing. This was surprising, since the relationship seems to have been much stronger than that of the one between William and his mother.

Amazing Biography...

of perhaps the greatest scientific and mathematical genius of all time--and how his parents and a malicious press made it all go terribly wrong. An enlightening and sobering read.

Great book

Great book of a personal hero I love the story and the deep of the information

Intriguing

A really interesting story about a man who could have been so much more if only the media and others let him be.

The Human Brain is a Complex Thing

What happened to William James Sidis is not surprising. Sad, yes, but nothing as complex as the human brain can be predictable. He had great potential as a child but so did Bobby Fischer, the greatest chess player of all time. Both, after amazing feats of brilliance, burned out. "Endgame" can be found at Audible.

If you get a chance, listen to both "The Prodigy" and "Endgame" and compare these two brilliant, but ultimately tragic men. There are many similar examples.

Fascinating story that reads like a novel.

This is the story of a man with an IQ of around 300. The story flows like a steady stream carrying the characters forward through personal whirlpools. The narrator is a gifted storyteller.

Great Book about a sad loss.

This was a great book about a sad loss of human potential and societies insecurities and prejudices.

Both an inspiration and a caution

The story was simultaneously interesting, inspirational, and sad.

It starts with a brief introduction to Sarah and Boris Sidis, William's parents, who were both 19th century Russian-Jewish immigrants. As a teen in czarist Russia, Boris had been arrested & placed in solitary confinement for teaching peasants to read; this ultimately led to him emigrating to America under a "plea bargain" of sorts. Sarah was a victim of the pogroms; during one brutal instance of mob violence when she was just 8, her house was ransacked and she was forced to hide in an old chimney after being separated from her family. Her family thus decided to flee Russia for America. Sarah & Boris independently settled in Boston for the same reason: they had heard it was a part of America where education was highly valued.

A reader can thereby easily see the origins of their love of education, their pacifism, egalitarianism, and concern for the downtrodden; qualities which William would keenly absorb in his upbringing. For instance, when he is one year old and barely able to speak, William tells his parents that his favorite thing in the world is the front door, because when it opens he meets new people.

Sarah and Boris together raise William using "the Sidis method". On paper it seems sound: teach children to understand the fundamentals of a subject so well that they can derive more complex things in that subject without memorizing. Supposedly, this enabled William to learn any language in a matter of weeks and master non-Euclidean geometry by age 10. He later entered Harvard at age 11, and his record as being the University's youngest entrant still stands to this day. Sarah and Boris saw his success as proof their method could work on any child, and might lead to a quasi-utopia if mass-implemented in early education. Sarah had planned to publish a "how-to" guide on implementing the Sidis method, but never did so, and only a few pages of the first draft survive to this day.

Reading between the lines, there are some hints of emotional abuse, or at least manipulation, in Sidis' upbringing. The accounts that Sarah would put guests--and even the children of guests--to work on her property when they would visit leads me to wonder if she saw everyone around her as expendable. She even at one point tried to impose the Sidis method on her nieces and nephews (including a young Clifton Fadiman), to the chagrin of their parents. Needless to say, people tended to avoid her company. There is also the disturbing tale of how William's parents threatened to institutionalize him for participating in a May Day parade that turned violent, even though William's arrest amounted to little more than a misdemeanor charge that only saw him spend a few nights in jail. This strikes me as being the moment where William decided to distance himself from them and almost everything they taught him permanently, including the love of education (he worked as a mere bookkeeper for the rest of his life).

In a particularly sad tangential chapter, the author recounts the lives of child prodigies from earlier centuries, many of whom either died before adulthood or amounted to little (the most notable exception being John Stuart Mill, who seems an intellectual forebear of Sidis).

The audiobook narration was OK. A few times a sentence was repeated in its entirety, but I don’t know if that was because of a misprint in the book itself, or clumsy narration. But it wasn’t too bothersome.

Sidis’s story is recommended for those who hope to one day raise an exceptional or above average child through “nurture”: both as a partial guide (some of the “Sidis Method” remains good advice for a child’s intellectual growth), and a cautionary tale. I would be very interested in knowing if there exists a "right" way to do the Sidis method or if it was doomed from the start. But that is a future project for an intrepid Doctor of Education or Psychologist.