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The Prodigy: A Biography of William James Sidis, America's Greatest Child Prodigy
William James Sidis (1898-1944) was born to a psychologist with some unorthodox ideas about child rearing, attended Harvard at an absurdly young age, burned out at 14, and spent most of the rest of his life working menial jobs and living in poverty. Dubbed a ``failed prodigy'' by the popular press, he lived out his years as an eccentric and a recluse. The truth is a lot more complex than this, and the "failure" a matter of perspective, as shown in this remarkable biography.
Wallace's book, the only biography of this most enigmatic of prodigies, gives us a balanced look at Sidis' up-bringing and a somewhat revisionist look at his later life. Sidis apparently was hard at work on manuscripts of various sorts even during his later years; this book is to my knowledge the only one that gives an account of that later work, which dealt with American Indians. New manuscripts by Sidis have surfaced since the writing of this book, including a book on traffic accident patterns.
Wallace's book, the only biography of this most enigmatic of prodigies, gives us a balanced look at Sidis' up-bringing and a somewhat revisionist look at his later life. Sidis apparently was hard at work on manuscripts of various sorts even during his later years; this book is to my knowledge the only one that gives an account of that later work, which dealt with American Indians. New manuscripts by Sidis have surfaced since the writing of this book, including a book on traffic accident patterns.
297 pages, Hardcover
First published June 26, 1986
About the author
Amy Wallace
45 books24 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Amy Wallace was an American author. She was the daughter of authors Irving Wallace and Sylvia Wallace and sister of historian David Wallechinsky.
Amy Wallace was an American author. She was the daughter of authors Irving Wallace and Sylvia Wallace and sister of historian David Wallechinsky.
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December 15, 2022
I hate to see how Sidis's life was portrayed in this one. He was a genuis, who by 9 wrote 4 academic books, which is more than most of us do in all our lifetimes. The guy predicted black holes, was interested in logistics of intercity transfers and knew a bunch of languages by the time he was 7. This is more than most people do. Ever. And this biography makes some kind of walking disappointment of him. I think it's unfair, to put it really mildly.
A horrible book on a beautiful subject: human mind, a brilliant one. William Sidis's life, I could grade it 1000. This book, gives a very sensationalistic angle of it, containing no debate on all the controversial things we know and probably lots that we just don't.
A horrible book on a beautiful subject: human mind, a brilliant one. William Sidis's life, I could grade it 1000. This book, gives a very sensationalistic angle of it, containing no debate on all the controversial things we know and probably lots that we just don't.
December 7, 2011
William James Sidis was born to a pair of immigrant autodidacts. And though they were mostly self-taught, both parents did obtain degrees in medicine (mom from Boston U, dad from Harvard). Boris Sidis, William’s father, was an early proponent of psychoanalysis, engaging in a transcontinental word war with Sigmund Freud. Boris is also to blame, along with William James (Henry James’s brother) with the oft quoted idea that we only use ten percent of our brains. James and Sidis espoused the idea of “reserve energy” which could be harnessed through specific educational techniques. Exhibit A of their theory: William James Sidis (who was named after his godfather, William James, and will be called Billy from here on out). Despite the evolutionary illogic of this idea, Billy’s feats were so extraordinary that rejecting them out of hand was a risky undertaking. And ahead is the standard list of Billy’s precocious accomplishments: reading the New York Times at 18 months; teaching himself Latin with a simple primer and Caesar’s Gallic Wars at 5 years – and all as a birthday present for his beloved father; being accepted into Harvard at age 9 (he wouldn’t attend until he was 11); created his own language before the age of 10; and so on and so forth. His mental acumen was a thing to behold. My favorite story from his biography, “The Prodigy” by Amy Wallace (no relation to DFW) really highlights Billy’s uniqueness. His mother Sarah would always answer any question Billy asked (part of their teaching techniques) - usually by going to the encyclopedia together and finding the answer. One day Billy asked his mother a question and - before she could reply - he said, “wait, you’re just going to say let’s go look it up, and I can just look it up myself”. This was the last lesson his parents ever gave him. He was five.
As a biography “The Prodigy” is rather spotty, full of caesurae, second-hand tales, and extrapolations of motive. This weakens what could have been a phenomenal book. Intelligence, parenting, mental illness, and media - all of these things converged in Billy’s life, molding him into a shunned recluse: an anti-social man searching for perfection. He never really had a chance. His parents raised him with a theory in mind; that is, any child - regardless of genetics - could be made into a prodigy if the parents followed simple guidelines. What are these guidelines you ask? Here is a sampling: answer ALL of your child’s questions; never say “don’t” to your child; try and discuss things just before bedtime when your child’s brain is most receptive to ideas. These are all good and valid ways to try and encourage your child’s natural curiosity, but the Sidis’s believed that their child’s precocity was the exclusive result of training and not genetics. This is somewhat laughable in 2011, but fin de siècle brain studies were in their infancy (if they were born at all). And the idea of an untapped reservoir of brain power just waiting to be unlocked was intoxicating in its allure. Of course contrasting with this is the idea that every human – whether prodigious or prosaic – is just a composite of genetics and environment. This was seen as dictatorial: a personally limiting concept, a sober slap in the face of sovereignty. And Boris Sidis did not believe he, nor his phenomenal progeny, should be limited by such genetic tyranny and thus presented his case for “reserve energy” in his book “Philistine and Genius”, using his son Billy as evidence for the validity of his theory. Sadly, this opened Billy up to the press, turning him into a “public figure” - a status which would haunt him for the rest of his life. Billy’s childhood became an instructive example in how knowledge has many different faces. Billy could learn a language in a day or two, but couldn’t teach himself (or maybe didn’t want to teach himself) how to manipulate the press to his advantage. The man who could say marriage a million ways couldn’t find relief in a woman’s companionship and intellect (interesting factoid: Billy’s one true (unrequited) love was Martha Foley, who co-founded Story magazine and served as a series editor for The Best American Short Stories). His parents introduced him to knowledge and the wondrous world of discovery, but because of his advanced development he never socialized with peers, never learned to code-switch, or fraternize, or (god forbid) enjoy a sporting event. These are all skills that could have soothed Billy’s transition from boy wonder into adroit adult. But Billy’s parents disdained the quotidian, relishing in Billy’s myriad mental accomplishments, all while using the specious argument that they never “pushed” Billy. But this is sophistry at its finest. One of the Sidis’s other parenting rules was always use “desire to please” over “fear of failure”; thus, Billy’s prepubescent feats were mostly done out of a desire to please his father. How Boris failed to realize this as “pushing” is beyond me – or maybe he did realize it, but shied away from the thought that he was emotionally manipulating his son. I can’t help but think that Billy himself realized this later on: as an adult he never spoke of his father; and of his mother, had only baleful things to say. This was after Billy’s bitter split from the family. The events surrounding this are vague, as both Billy and his mother never spoke of the split in any published sources. What’s known is this: Billy was part of a socialist protest on May Day in Boston that turned violent. He was arrested and sentenced to 18 months under the Sedition Act of 1918. All Billy did – as he testified in court – was march at the head of the protest while holding a piece of red silk. Although sentenced, Billy never served any time. His father (presumably) got his charges nol-prossed under the condition that he and Sarah take Billy under their care, and reform him at the sanitarium that they ran. The Sidis Sanitarium - which was located on a large farm in Portsmouth, NH - was operated according to Boris’s ideas about psychoanalysis. It admitted mostly rich, whimsical patients - allaying their neuroses through nature, fellowship, and an early form of talk therapy. But for Billy’s psychic issues it aggravated rather than allayed. Every summer he would go live on the farm with his parents, and the media would sensationalize: reporting a mental breakdown and a trip to a sanatorium. It seems both parents were oblivious to this and after the last “kidnapping” (as Billy called it), his parents moved to California, taking Billy and his sister with them (his sister is a whole other story that shows the psychic abuse Sarah Sidis could wield). It was in the Golden State that Billy finally left his family for good, livid with their manipulation of his criminal charges which forced Billy to live with them. He never spoke with his mother again. When his father died a few years later, he only showed up to collect the inheritance, skipping the funeral altogether.
After Billy’s death, most newspapers proclaimed him to be a flame-out, with headlines such as “Prodigious Failure” littering the nation’s dailies. They blamed his limited mature output and desire for mindless occupation on the pressures that Billy’s parents (of course no one in the media noted their own role in increasing this pressure) put upon him. But despite refusing to take a mentally challenging profession – he worked as a comptometer operator his whole life – Billy’s intellectual life was anything but infertile. He published one book under his name, titled “The Animate and the Inanimate”, in which he adduced the existence of on object very much like a black hole. This was in 1925, six years before Chandrasekhar’s calculations, and arrived at in total isolation from any institution or peer support (he graduated from Harvard in 1914 at the age of sixteen). His book was published to apathy and silence. The press only cared about Billy’s failures not his successes. Unfortunately, this treatment pushed Billy further from the fields of math and physics (which along with linguistics were his strongest areas) and he never again published anything in these fields, even claiming later in life that the mere site of equations made him physically ill. And yet, Billy didn’t cease from publication all together. He released numerous books, magazines, and newsletters, all under semi-humorous pseudonyms (Frank Falupa, etc.); he even founded a new hobby: peridromiphily, you might know it as trainspotting (and no, trainspotting is not recreational drug use).
Sidis’s biography, and really his life as a whole, raises questions about the ethics of trying to raise your progeny as a prodigy. There are large trade-offs that are made, a fact that most of these parents try intensely to ignore. For example, it’s hard to be socially graceful when you’ve been thinking about the fourth dimension all day long. This is made exponentially more difficult when you are eleven years old. And it was Billy’s social failings that made him such a target of the press. That, and the fact that at the age of eleven he was smarter than all of the journalists who were writing about him: this tends to engender jealousy. I sometimes like to think there is a special place in hell for people who - in the klieg lights of the national press - so gleefully try and tear down an already fragile, and somewhat exploited child. After all, that’s what he was when they began running articles about the young professor and all his eccentricities. The Houston university press in particular will receive a spot right next to the furnace for their unique southern brand of vitriol. And while Billy’s proclivities were the ostensible reason, the real reason for the press’s vicious schadenfreude was the desire to always beat down those who stand out (see the magazine rack at your local supermarket if you would like to see this in action). Later in life, Billy attempted to sue “The New Yorker” after they ran a Where-Are-They-Now article that pilloried Billy for his lowly lodgings and lack of mainstream academic success. He argued that he had long since stopped being a “public figure”, and thus his privacy should be respected by the magazine. This case dragged on for years, with Billy using his legal acumen to contribute to his lawyers’ formulation of the case (he attended Harvard Law School but left just before graduating). This case went all the way to the Supreme Court which stated, “once a public figure, always a public figure” - thus Billy was forced against his will to remain a public figure open to published ridicule and humiliation. The injustice of this being that his parents made him (without his consent) a “public figure” when he was a five-year-old boy: inviting journalists into their home. Now I don’t wholly disagree with this ruling in a strictly legal sense, but from an ethical perspective “The New Yorker” and James Thurber – who pseudonymously wrote the condescending article that reinserted Billy into the national consciousness – are wholly in the wrong. Billy eventually did settle out of court with “The New Yorker”, for a few hundred dollars. And when Billy died, his sister found the settlement money in his account, untouched, as a symbol of his only and small victory over the media.
Billy’s life can be read in many ways. But I prefer to read it as a man who overcame shoddy and incomplete parenting, rancorous reporters, and a mind-blowing mind, to create an isolated yet self-satisfying life. He maintained friendships with people who were committed to respecting his privacy. He taught a small cadre of students his idiosyncratic, yet wholly original, ideas about Native Americans and their contribution to the formation of America, past and present. He also found unparalleled ways to challenge his mind: memorizing street train routes for hundreds of cities, knowing the day of the week for any date, inventing his own language, so forth and so on. However, he was also incredibly normal in that he attempted to pursue his own brand of personal happiness. And this, despite being overwhelmingly different in that his genetics and upbringing – and the subsequent skyscraping intellect they produced – made him into a living experiment to some people: with his every eccentricity and perceived failure being magnified and used as evidence for the failure of Boris’s theories (the only vestige of these theories being that damn 10% of your brain crap, that people keep repeating). But Billy owed society not a thing; and great intellect doesn’t mean great insight into how to use that intellect. Or, even more so, how to navigate an envious world that covets and condescends simultaneously. There’s a great line from the book “Memories of the Future” about the sun shining on credit. How we are given gifts, artistic and otherwise, and we owe it to the sun – here a metonym for society – to do our darndest to repay its largess. It’s similar to the ideas explored in Lewis Hyde’s “The Gift”. Thus, some might see Billy as a dead-beat debtor where the sun’s concerned, but I don’t: I see Billy as an exploited child, who somehow found happiness in his own way.
adversus solem ne loquitor
As a biography “The Prodigy” is rather spotty, full of caesurae, second-hand tales, and extrapolations of motive. This weakens what could have been a phenomenal book. Intelligence, parenting, mental illness, and media - all of these things converged in Billy’s life, molding him into a shunned recluse: an anti-social man searching for perfection. He never really had a chance. His parents raised him with a theory in mind; that is, any child - regardless of genetics - could be made into a prodigy if the parents followed simple guidelines. What are these guidelines you ask? Here is a sampling: answer ALL of your child’s questions; never say “don’t” to your child; try and discuss things just before bedtime when your child’s brain is most receptive to ideas. These are all good and valid ways to try and encourage your child’s natural curiosity, but the Sidis’s believed that their child’s precocity was the exclusive result of training and not genetics. This is somewhat laughable in 2011, but fin de siècle brain studies were in their infancy (if they were born at all). And the idea of an untapped reservoir of brain power just waiting to be unlocked was intoxicating in its allure. Of course contrasting with this is the idea that every human – whether prodigious or prosaic – is just a composite of genetics and environment. This was seen as dictatorial: a personally limiting concept, a sober slap in the face of sovereignty. And Boris Sidis did not believe he, nor his phenomenal progeny, should be limited by such genetic tyranny and thus presented his case for “reserve energy” in his book “Philistine and Genius”, using his son Billy as evidence for the validity of his theory. Sadly, this opened Billy up to the press, turning him into a “public figure” - a status which would haunt him for the rest of his life. Billy’s childhood became an instructive example in how knowledge has many different faces. Billy could learn a language in a day or two, but couldn’t teach himself (or maybe didn’t want to teach himself) how to manipulate the press to his advantage. The man who could say marriage a million ways couldn’t find relief in a woman’s companionship and intellect (interesting factoid: Billy’s one true (unrequited) love was Martha Foley, who co-founded Story magazine and served as a series editor for The Best American Short Stories). His parents introduced him to knowledge and the wondrous world of discovery, but because of his advanced development he never socialized with peers, never learned to code-switch, or fraternize, or (god forbid) enjoy a sporting event. These are all skills that could have soothed Billy’s transition from boy wonder into adroit adult. But Billy’s parents disdained the quotidian, relishing in Billy’s myriad mental accomplishments, all while using the specious argument that they never “pushed” Billy. But this is sophistry at its finest. One of the Sidis’s other parenting rules was always use “desire to please” over “fear of failure”; thus, Billy’s prepubescent feats were mostly done out of a desire to please his father. How Boris failed to realize this as “pushing” is beyond me – or maybe he did realize it, but shied away from the thought that he was emotionally manipulating his son. I can’t help but think that Billy himself realized this later on: as an adult he never spoke of his father; and of his mother, had only baleful things to say. This was after Billy’s bitter split from the family. The events surrounding this are vague, as both Billy and his mother never spoke of the split in any published sources. What’s known is this: Billy was part of a socialist protest on May Day in Boston that turned violent. He was arrested and sentenced to 18 months under the Sedition Act of 1918. All Billy did – as he testified in court – was march at the head of the protest while holding a piece of red silk. Although sentenced, Billy never served any time. His father (presumably) got his charges nol-prossed under the condition that he and Sarah take Billy under their care, and reform him at the sanitarium that they ran. The Sidis Sanitarium - which was located on a large farm in Portsmouth, NH - was operated according to Boris’s ideas about psychoanalysis. It admitted mostly rich, whimsical patients - allaying their neuroses through nature, fellowship, and an early form of talk therapy. But for Billy’s psychic issues it aggravated rather than allayed. Every summer he would go live on the farm with his parents, and the media would sensationalize: reporting a mental breakdown and a trip to a sanatorium. It seems both parents were oblivious to this and after the last “kidnapping” (as Billy called it), his parents moved to California, taking Billy and his sister with them (his sister is a whole other story that shows the psychic abuse Sarah Sidis could wield). It was in the Golden State that Billy finally left his family for good, livid with their manipulation of his criminal charges which forced Billy to live with them. He never spoke with his mother again. When his father died a few years later, he only showed up to collect the inheritance, skipping the funeral altogether.
After Billy’s death, most newspapers proclaimed him to be a flame-out, with headlines such as “Prodigious Failure” littering the nation’s dailies. They blamed his limited mature output and desire for mindless occupation on the pressures that Billy’s parents (of course no one in the media noted their own role in increasing this pressure) put upon him. But despite refusing to take a mentally challenging profession – he worked as a comptometer operator his whole life – Billy’s intellectual life was anything but infertile. He published one book under his name, titled “The Animate and the Inanimate”, in which he adduced the existence of on object very much like a black hole. This was in 1925, six years before Chandrasekhar’s calculations, and arrived at in total isolation from any institution or peer support (he graduated from Harvard in 1914 at the age of sixteen). His book was published to apathy and silence. The press only cared about Billy’s failures not his successes. Unfortunately, this treatment pushed Billy further from the fields of math and physics (which along with linguistics were his strongest areas) and he never again published anything in these fields, even claiming later in life that the mere site of equations made him physically ill. And yet, Billy didn’t cease from publication all together. He released numerous books, magazines, and newsletters, all under semi-humorous pseudonyms (Frank Falupa, etc.); he even founded a new hobby: peridromiphily, you might know it as trainspotting (and no, trainspotting is not recreational drug use).
Sidis’s biography, and really his life as a whole, raises questions about the ethics of trying to raise your progeny as a prodigy. There are large trade-offs that are made, a fact that most of these parents try intensely to ignore. For example, it’s hard to be socially graceful when you’ve been thinking about the fourth dimension all day long. This is made exponentially more difficult when you are eleven years old. And it was Billy’s social failings that made him such a target of the press. That, and the fact that at the age of eleven he was smarter than all of the journalists who were writing about him: this tends to engender jealousy. I sometimes like to think there is a special place in hell for people who - in the klieg lights of the national press - so gleefully try and tear down an already fragile, and somewhat exploited child. After all, that’s what he was when they began running articles about the young professor and all his eccentricities. The Houston university press in particular will receive a spot right next to the furnace for their unique southern brand of vitriol. And while Billy’s proclivities were the ostensible reason, the real reason for the press’s vicious schadenfreude was the desire to always beat down those who stand out (see the magazine rack at your local supermarket if you would like to see this in action). Later in life, Billy attempted to sue “The New Yorker” after they ran a Where-Are-They-Now article that pilloried Billy for his lowly lodgings and lack of mainstream academic success. He argued that he had long since stopped being a “public figure”, and thus his privacy should be respected by the magazine. This case dragged on for years, with Billy using his legal acumen to contribute to his lawyers’ formulation of the case (he attended Harvard Law School but left just before graduating). This case went all the way to the Supreme Court which stated, “once a public figure, always a public figure” - thus Billy was forced against his will to remain a public figure open to published ridicule and humiliation. The injustice of this being that his parents made him (without his consent) a “public figure” when he was a five-year-old boy: inviting journalists into their home. Now I don’t wholly disagree with this ruling in a strictly legal sense, but from an ethical perspective “The New Yorker” and James Thurber – who pseudonymously wrote the condescending article that reinserted Billy into the national consciousness – are wholly in the wrong. Billy eventually did settle out of court with “The New Yorker”, for a few hundred dollars. And when Billy died, his sister found the settlement money in his account, untouched, as a symbol of his only and small victory over the media.
Billy’s life can be read in many ways. But I prefer to read it as a man who overcame shoddy and incomplete parenting, rancorous reporters, and a mind-blowing mind, to create an isolated yet self-satisfying life. He maintained friendships with people who were committed to respecting his privacy. He taught a small cadre of students his idiosyncratic, yet wholly original, ideas about Native Americans and their contribution to the formation of America, past and present. He also found unparalleled ways to challenge his mind: memorizing street train routes for hundreds of cities, knowing the day of the week for any date, inventing his own language, so forth and so on. However, he was also incredibly normal in that he attempted to pursue his own brand of personal happiness. And this, despite being overwhelmingly different in that his genetics and upbringing – and the subsequent skyscraping intellect they produced – made him into a living experiment to some people: with his every eccentricity and perceived failure being magnified and used as evidence for the failure of Boris’s theories (the only vestige of these theories being that damn 10% of your brain crap, that people keep repeating). But Billy owed society not a thing; and great intellect doesn’t mean great insight into how to use that intellect. Or, even more so, how to navigate an envious world that covets and condescends simultaneously. There’s a great line from the book “Memories of the Future” about the sun shining on credit. How we are given gifts, artistic and otherwise, and we owe it to the sun – here a metonym for society – to do our darndest to repay its largess. It’s similar to the ideas explored in Lewis Hyde’s “The Gift”. Thus, some might see Billy as a dead-beat debtor where the sun’s concerned, but I don’t: I see Billy as an exploited child, who somehow found happiness in his own way.
adversus solem ne loquitor
March 18, 2019
"Child prodigy is a curse because you've got all those terrible possibilities.” Itzhak Perlman
“The Prodigy” is the life story of William James Sidis, who might have been born with one of the highest IQs in the world. Being a parent of a "gifted" child (now an adult) I know something about raising a sensitive and very bright kid. I know you need to hold back before you push any child to do things before they are mentally and emotionally ready. You always keep their best interests in mind.
William had parents who were both brilliant, Jewish-Russian immigrants who despite being highly educated made extremely poor choices for their son. The father who was a Harvard graduate, a psychologist, was a respected pioneer in his field but seemed hell bent on making a name for himself and his child-raising theories through his child. He wanted to be “the father” of a child prodigy. The mother was not much better, an intelligent medical doctor, she also had zero psychological insight and failed her son by allowing her husband and others to exploit him.
The late author, Amy Wallace, had a very good understanding and sympathy of her genius subject and his later mysterious hidden life. William James Sidis was born in 1898 in New York City. He was reading the New York Times at 18 months and he was typewriting at three. His parents put him in Harvard at eleven (which in this reader-mothers mind) was a giant disservice to him. He became very famous and the press followed him everywhere calling him “the little professor.” He had a photogenic memory and excelled at complex mathematics as a teenager.
The press stalked and never let him let him be his entire life and the parents raised him like he was a trained monkey for peer approval and status. Understandably at some point, he suffered burnout from the pressure and dropped out of academia. The press continued to hound him, parents failed to protect him and started to complain about his new radical political ideas. He went underground. Later he rejected his parents completely especially his mother. The press and the public at the time considered him a “failed genius.” However that was not the case and thankfully the author points out, he was researching, writing and publishing serious books, some of his brilliant manuscripts were about cosmology , dark holes and even the philosophy and history of the American Indians whom he admired, until his death at 45 in 1944. A paper he wrote in 1925 on the second law of thermodynamics was ahead of his time and widely respected.
An interesting look at a life that was steered wrong from the very beginning. His failed “gifted” education and the way mainstream society and his own parents treated him was simply appalling. All he wanted was a quiet life where he could work, be appreciated and loved for simply being himself. Four stars.
“The Prodigy” is the life story of William James Sidis, who might have been born with one of the highest IQs in the world. Being a parent of a "gifted" child (now an adult) I know something about raising a sensitive and very bright kid. I know you need to hold back before you push any child to do things before they are mentally and emotionally ready. You always keep their best interests in mind.
William had parents who were both brilliant, Jewish-Russian immigrants who despite being highly educated made extremely poor choices for their son. The father who was a Harvard graduate, a psychologist, was a respected pioneer in his field but seemed hell bent on making a name for himself and his child-raising theories through his child. He wanted to be “the father” of a child prodigy. The mother was not much better, an intelligent medical doctor, she also had zero psychological insight and failed her son by allowing her husband and others to exploit him.
The late author, Amy Wallace, had a very good understanding and sympathy of her genius subject and his later mysterious hidden life. William James Sidis was born in 1898 in New York City. He was reading the New York Times at 18 months and he was typewriting at three. His parents put him in Harvard at eleven (which in this reader-mothers mind) was a giant disservice to him. He became very famous and the press followed him everywhere calling him “the little professor.” He had a photogenic memory and excelled at complex mathematics as a teenager.
The press stalked and never let him let him be his entire life and the parents raised him like he was a trained monkey for peer approval and status. Understandably at some point, he suffered burnout from the pressure and dropped out of academia. The press continued to hound him, parents failed to protect him and started to complain about his new radical political ideas. He went underground. Later he rejected his parents completely especially his mother. The press and the public at the time considered him a “failed genius.” However that was not the case and thankfully the author points out, he was researching, writing and publishing serious books, some of his brilliant manuscripts were about cosmology , dark holes and even the philosophy and history of the American Indians whom he admired, until his death at 45 in 1944. A paper he wrote in 1925 on the second law of thermodynamics was ahead of his time and widely respected.
An interesting look at a life that was steered wrong from the very beginning. His failed “gifted” education and the way mainstream society and his own parents treated him was simply appalling. All he wanted was a quiet life where he could work, be appreciated and loved for simply being himself. Four stars.
May 25, 2020
Found a copy of this book (out of print) because the subject is a far-back relative of mine. This was a very interesting read, and also sad, and I could sense some weird echoes down the family line. The author does a very good job of humanizing someone that the press and others simultaneously deified and mocked. However, at times I wished for a better understanding of her sources and more details - though some or much of this may be due to a lack of information. There were also places where the author would conjecture emotions and motivations that I wish had more substance or outlined reasoning behind them. Nonetheless, overall I found the pacing and content of the biography to be compelling, and its subject was treated with, it appears, both compassion and honesty.
March 4, 2021
A book mainly about William/Billy Sidis, but also talks about other child prodigies of the time too.
“The boy was healthy, sane, and, I believe, normal in every respect. He was the victim not of intensive education given him by his father, Dr. Boris Sidis, nor of the romantic curse called Genius, but of the thoughtless cruelty of the public. He was treated like a two-headed calf. His boyish singularities—and what lad of seventeen is a pattern of mellow wisdom—were mercilessly exposed and amplified. Because he blurted out that he had never kissed a girl, he was made the butt of endless practical jokes.” - Dr. Guerard (118-119).
Where did he get his genius? It might have been because of his Jewish race, or it might’ve been because both of his parents were exceptionally smart (smarter than their siblings). (His father knew 27 languages, and Billy knew every language in the world and could learn a new one in a day [126]!) Billy’s head was “large, especially in the rear at the top” (45). One person thought that his intelligence was “fully explained by the Oriental doctrine of reincarnation” (61). (IMO, if the knowledge from our past lives could be remembered by everyone, then each generation would be smarter than the last, but that isn’t the case.) Billy’s parents always attributed his genius to his upbringing (52), except for one time when his mother admitted that Billy “was born exceptional, and that there was no way he could have had a normal childhood” (255).
Favorite quotes:
“We do not care to develop a love of knowledge in their early life for fear of brain injury, and then when it is too late to acquire the interest, we force them to study, and we cram them and feed them like geese. What you often get is fatty degeneration of the mental liver.” - Boris Sidis, criticizing mainstream treatment of children (80). A very fitting comparison.
“Anyone who sends his son to college is a fool—a boy can learn more in a public library.” - William Sidis (229).
Billy’s mother Sarah was the fifth of 15 kids, and she and her older sister had to raise the younger ones. She noticed that if she treated them “gently and kindly, they obeyed her properly” (7). “If we brought Billy up to love us, by our love and gentleness, then he would want to please us. And if we were always pleased by good conduct, he would be a good boy” (20). “Boris’s studies of sleep indicated that the period just before falling asleep is a highly suggestible one, during which the mind is particularly receptive” (20), so Billy’s mother used Greek myths for his bedtime stories (21). Billy’s parents treated Billy like an adult, didn’t use baby talk with him, and answered all his questions (20-21). Sarah’s other guidelines for how to raise a genius (280-281):
Don’t punish, lie, or say “don’t.” Explain your reasons for why you’re telling him what to do. Awaken curiosity and don’t force your child to learn. The only advice she gives that she didn’t practice herself was: Don’t show him off.
Modern parenting books also advise almost all of those things (the exceptions are forcing kids to learn and implanting ideas at bedtime), thinking that following this advice will produce empathetic, creative, confident, loving, well behaved, critical thinking, problem solving adults. Yet when Billy became an adult, he was not confident, he was not obedient to his parents, and he hated his mother (253). Just goes to show you that even if you give your kid tons of love and praise, and never punish them or say “don’t,” the kid still might hate you.
Sarah’s reason for not using punishment was because “it is the first cause of fear” (280). I think that’s a bad reason. Fear is natural in all animals, including humans; it doesn’t need to be taught. Even if parents never punish their kids, the kid will still have fears, like of a dog or the dark or monsters or pain or strangers. Billy was full of fear as an adult, so his parents sparing him from punishment didn’t help.
Billy was considered a failure by some because he was so smart but chose to work low skill jobs so he could keep out of the spotlight and have time to pursue his own interests. People blame his parents for not encouraging him to be social or play sports. But even if he had been kept in the grade he should have been in based on his age, he still would have been smarter than his peers, not fit in, probably bullied, had no interest in sports, and ended up a shy adult. Just because a kid is surrounded by same age peers doesnt mean s/he will be liked or treated well. It’s normal for smart kids to be excluded or teased. What could have helped Billy was if his parents kept the press away from him, and taught him not to talk to the press. Probably to homeschool him too, to keep him away from bullies up until college. Billy had uncommon opinions that made him ridiculed, which made him nervous in front of people. His parents nurtured his great potential, but it was society’s harassment of him that made him want to hide. Before he got ridiculed, he had great confidence giving lectures at a young age. The problem is, intelligence is only valued by society in the very young. So society was impressed by him when he was a kid. When he became a teen, society had different expectations: be social, mannerly, date (172). He refused to conform to those things, and so he was teased and insulted. His intelligence no longer mattered to society if he was a social failure (172, 174).
Other interesting child prodigies:
Norbert Wiener - Russian Jew whose father yelled at him and insulted him when he got wrong answers. “Despite generally oppressive treatment, Norbert continued to crave his father’s praise and approval well into adulthood” (57). He had no skills of hygiene or social norms (57). Parents believed his success was due to upbringing, not heredity.
Adolf A. Berle, “whose brothers and sisters were also prodigies” (56). His parents, like the Sidises, “had trained their children to reason rather than memorize, and to think of learning as play” (56). Adolf was more outgoing and skilled in social skills than Billy Sidis (56). Parents believed his success was due to upbringing, not heredity.
Zerah Colburn of Vermont was able to perform quick advanced math in his head, but couldn’t do simple math on paper. His ability faded with time (62).
Carl Friedrich Gauss was born from a “poor, uncouth laborer” in Germany (63). His parents didn’t encourage the growth of boy’s mind, but his uncle did.
John Stuart Mill from London. Like Boris Sidis, Mill’s father valued reason and understanding over memorizing facts (64). But Mill’s father was a severe authoritarian like Wiener’s. Like Sarah Sidis, Mill’s father didn’t like fairy tales and chose to expose him to Aesop’s fables instead. Mill was kept away from same-age peers and was physically awkward and had trouble dealing with practicalities of daily life (64-65). “Like Sidis, Mill could be dogmatic, a logical arguing machine with no sense of social graces. Like Sidis, he was unconcerned with his manners and appearance” (65). Mill believed his intelligence was from upbringing, not heredity (67).
“Like Sidis, many prodigies had photographic memories” (63). Most prodigies only had one talent, but Sidis was intelligent in many subjects (63).
Billy and other prodigies had autistic tendencies. Billy hated crowds (106), had odd narrow interests (transfers), wasn’t into romance or sex (171, 217), and didn’t care about hygiene or appearance (153). He was honest and naively thought others were honest too (133). He seemed unaware or uncaring of people’s opinions of him; he would talk on subjects that bored people, or complain loudly about his parents without seeming to notice his voice was too loud (162). Billy “seems to have difficulty in finding the right words to express himself, but when he does, he speaks rapidly, nodding his head jerkily to emphasize his points, gesturing with his left hand, uttering occasionally a curious, gasping laugh” (230). Like Billy, Norbert Wiener “lacked the social graces” (175), but Norbert worried about it while Billy did not (176).
“The mistake of these parents of prodigies, then, was to assume that their children, with their marvelous brains, would absorb the commonsense details of life as easily as they would their Latin declensions, and with less need of instruction” (179). I don’t see why smart people would not be smart enough to be smart socially as well, unless their brains are simply incapable of picking up on those cues, as with autism.
“Shirley teased him, saying, ‘You know, William, when people ask you how you are, they don’t want to hear the details’” (272). William took things literally, which is a logical thing to do, but I guess he failed to observe what most people say when they’re asked “how are you?”
Interesting:
Billy’s father Boris was imprisoned in Russia for teaching people to read. He had to walk barefoot in the snow to Siberia, and his cell only had enough space for his body. He stayed there for 2 years and had nothing to do. “He owed to them, he said, his courage and his ability to reason. He later regarded it as one of his greatest creative periods. He could not be broken, because in his stinking wretched cell he had learned to think” (3). Just goes to show that solitude and boredom can be beneficial.
Helena Sidis: “I’d hear my mother talking with a woman friend, saying that if a woman stoops to professional work, it affects her husband. He doesn’t work as hard” (96). Makes sense, since why should a man feel that he has to work hard when he has a partner bringing in money too? Likewise, the poor work harder when they feel they have to, and they get lazy when they know they’ll have freebies to fall back on.
Billy and his father both died of cerebral hemorrhage (166, 273). It’s interesting to me that they were both so smart, and their cause of death had to do with the brain.
Billy’s friend Nathan Sharfman “married a beautiful young girl and had a child, and it seemed he had a magnificent life and career ahead. However, he took to drink, lost the wife, and made an outrageous drunken scene at a dinner party” (259). Another example of alcohol ruining everything.
“On June 5, 1917, the federal government passed the Espionage act, which made opposition to the draft or to enlistment punishable by a fine of up to ten thousand dollars and twenty years in prison, and gave the government the power to censor and ban radical literature from the mails. The act was soon broadened to include such crimes as ‘profane, scurrilous, and abusive language,’ and any activities that could be construed as anti-American” (129). I never knew that the US government was so oppressive. I guess what’s going on now isn’t anything new in the US; now it’s just the conservatives turn to get oppressed, whereas back then it was the socialists who got oppressed.
“An Indiana jury took two minutes to acquit a man who shot and killed an alien who had shouted, ‘To hell with the United States!’” (138). Nowadays, it’s patriotism that is unpopular.
Back then, the left wing peacefully protested, and people attacked them. Only the left wing radicals were arrested (139). Nowadays the left gets away with violence, and if the right does any counterprotesting, the right gets blamed for the violence. Any left wingers who get arrested are quickly released.
It was also surprising to me to see evidence of so much lying by the press (58, 228, 275, 276). I thought this was just a modern phenomenon (in the US at least), but I guess not.
“A government not based on the will of the people must, in the nature of things, rule by fear, by keeping the people in constant subjection; and the people will be kept in subjection as long as they can be made to fear” (131).
“According to William’s theory of geographical/political continuity, a people tended to repeat its political history over and over again. For example, the Russians replaced their Tsar with brutal Communist dictators; Americans continually strove for the proud democracy that was their first form of government; and the Nazis were another manifestation of the evil Kaiser’s reign” (262). Interesting. I hope that means that despite the trouble America may be facing right now, that we’ll one day have freedom again.
Billy’s later-in-life manifesto for the American Independence Society which he founded: “We believe that the right of equality, as stated in the Declaration of Independence, does not mean that all persons are exact duplicates of one another, and does not, cannot, imply any sort of forcible leveling, discipline, or regimentation; for such leveling action can provide no equality except that of equal submission to a superior authority, which is in itself the most flagrant denial of equality, liberty, pursuit of happiness, as well as of the requirement of consent of the governed” (204).
“The boy was healthy, sane, and, I believe, normal in every respect. He was the victim not of intensive education given him by his father, Dr. Boris Sidis, nor of the romantic curse called Genius, but of the thoughtless cruelty of the public. He was treated like a two-headed calf. His boyish singularities—and what lad of seventeen is a pattern of mellow wisdom—were mercilessly exposed and amplified. Because he blurted out that he had never kissed a girl, he was made the butt of endless practical jokes.” - Dr. Guerard (118-119).
Where did he get his genius? It might have been because of his Jewish race, or it might’ve been because both of his parents were exceptionally smart (smarter than their siblings). (His father knew 27 languages, and Billy knew every language in the world and could learn a new one in a day [126]!) Billy’s head was “large, especially in the rear at the top” (45). One person thought that his intelligence was “fully explained by the Oriental doctrine of reincarnation” (61). (IMO, if the knowledge from our past lives could be remembered by everyone, then each generation would be smarter than the last, but that isn’t the case.) Billy’s parents always attributed his genius to his upbringing (52), except for one time when his mother admitted that Billy “was born exceptional, and that there was no way he could have had a normal childhood” (255).
Favorite quotes:
“We do not care to develop a love of knowledge in their early life for fear of brain injury, and then when it is too late to acquire the interest, we force them to study, and we cram them and feed them like geese. What you often get is fatty degeneration of the mental liver.” - Boris Sidis, criticizing mainstream treatment of children (80). A very fitting comparison.
“Anyone who sends his son to college is a fool—a boy can learn more in a public library.” - William Sidis (229).
Billy’s mother Sarah was the fifth of 15 kids, and she and her older sister had to raise the younger ones. She noticed that if she treated them “gently and kindly, they obeyed her properly” (7). “If we brought Billy up to love us, by our love and gentleness, then he would want to please us. And if we were always pleased by good conduct, he would be a good boy” (20). “Boris’s studies of sleep indicated that the period just before falling asleep is a highly suggestible one, during which the mind is particularly receptive” (20), so Billy’s mother used Greek myths for his bedtime stories (21). Billy’s parents treated Billy like an adult, didn’t use baby talk with him, and answered all his questions (20-21). Sarah’s other guidelines for how to raise a genius (280-281):
Don’t punish, lie, or say “don’t.” Explain your reasons for why you’re telling him what to do. Awaken curiosity and don’t force your child to learn. The only advice she gives that she didn’t practice herself was: Don’t show him off.
Modern parenting books also advise almost all of those things (the exceptions are forcing kids to learn and implanting ideas at bedtime), thinking that following this advice will produce empathetic, creative, confident, loving, well behaved, critical thinking, problem solving adults. Yet when Billy became an adult, he was not confident, he was not obedient to his parents, and he hated his mother (253). Just goes to show you that even if you give your kid tons of love and praise, and never punish them or say “don’t,” the kid still might hate you.
Sarah’s reason for not using punishment was because “it is the first cause of fear” (280). I think that’s a bad reason. Fear is natural in all animals, including humans; it doesn’t need to be taught. Even if parents never punish their kids, the kid will still have fears, like of a dog or the dark or monsters or pain or strangers. Billy was full of fear as an adult, so his parents sparing him from punishment didn’t help.
Billy was considered a failure by some because he was so smart but chose to work low skill jobs so he could keep out of the spotlight and have time to pursue his own interests. People blame his parents for not encouraging him to be social or play sports. But even if he had been kept in the grade he should have been in based on his age, he still would have been smarter than his peers, not fit in, probably bullied, had no interest in sports, and ended up a shy adult. Just because a kid is surrounded by same age peers doesnt mean s/he will be liked or treated well. It’s normal for smart kids to be excluded or teased. What could have helped Billy was if his parents kept the press away from him, and taught him not to talk to the press. Probably to homeschool him too, to keep him away from bullies up until college. Billy had uncommon opinions that made him ridiculed, which made him nervous in front of people. His parents nurtured his great potential, but it was society’s harassment of him that made him want to hide. Before he got ridiculed, he had great confidence giving lectures at a young age. The problem is, intelligence is only valued by society in the very young. So society was impressed by him when he was a kid. When he became a teen, society had different expectations: be social, mannerly, date (172). He refused to conform to those things, and so he was teased and insulted. His intelligence no longer mattered to society if he was a social failure (172, 174).
Other interesting child prodigies:
Norbert Wiener - Russian Jew whose father yelled at him and insulted him when he got wrong answers. “Despite generally oppressive treatment, Norbert continued to crave his father’s praise and approval well into adulthood” (57). He had no skills of hygiene or social norms (57). Parents believed his success was due to upbringing, not heredity.
Adolf A. Berle, “whose brothers and sisters were also prodigies” (56). His parents, like the Sidises, “had trained their children to reason rather than memorize, and to think of learning as play” (56). Adolf was more outgoing and skilled in social skills than Billy Sidis (56). Parents believed his success was due to upbringing, not heredity.
Zerah Colburn of Vermont was able to perform quick advanced math in his head, but couldn’t do simple math on paper. His ability faded with time (62).
Carl Friedrich Gauss was born from a “poor, uncouth laborer” in Germany (63). His parents didn’t encourage the growth of boy’s mind, but his uncle did.
John Stuart Mill from London. Like Boris Sidis, Mill’s father valued reason and understanding over memorizing facts (64). But Mill’s father was a severe authoritarian like Wiener’s. Like Sarah Sidis, Mill’s father didn’t like fairy tales and chose to expose him to Aesop’s fables instead. Mill was kept away from same-age peers and was physically awkward and had trouble dealing with practicalities of daily life (64-65). “Like Sidis, Mill could be dogmatic, a logical arguing machine with no sense of social graces. Like Sidis, he was unconcerned with his manners and appearance” (65). Mill believed his intelligence was from upbringing, not heredity (67).
“Like Sidis, many prodigies had photographic memories” (63). Most prodigies only had one talent, but Sidis was intelligent in many subjects (63).
Billy and other prodigies had autistic tendencies. Billy hated crowds (106), had odd narrow interests (transfers), wasn’t into romance or sex (171, 217), and didn’t care about hygiene or appearance (153). He was honest and naively thought others were honest too (133). He seemed unaware or uncaring of people’s opinions of him; he would talk on subjects that bored people, or complain loudly about his parents without seeming to notice his voice was too loud (162). Billy “seems to have difficulty in finding the right words to express himself, but when he does, he speaks rapidly, nodding his head jerkily to emphasize his points, gesturing with his left hand, uttering occasionally a curious, gasping laugh” (230). Like Billy, Norbert Wiener “lacked the social graces” (175), but Norbert worried about it while Billy did not (176).
“The mistake of these parents of prodigies, then, was to assume that their children, with their marvelous brains, would absorb the commonsense details of life as easily as they would their Latin declensions, and with less need of instruction” (179). I don’t see why smart people would not be smart enough to be smart socially as well, unless their brains are simply incapable of picking up on those cues, as with autism.
“Shirley teased him, saying, ‘You know, William, when people ask you how you are, they don’t want to hear the details’” (272). William took things literally, which is a logical thing to do, but I guess he failed to observe what most people say when they’re asked “how are you?”
Interesting:
Billy’s father Boris was imprisoned in Russia for teaching people to read. He had to walk barefoot in the snow to Siberia, and his cell only had enough space for his body. He stayed there for 2 years and had nothing to do. “He owed to them, he said, his courage and his ability to reason. He later regarded it as one of his greatest creative periods. He could not be broken, because in his stinking wretched cell he had learned to think” (3). Just goes to show that solitude and boredom can be beneficial.
Helena Sidis: “I’d hear my mother talking with a woman friend, saying that if a woman stoops to professional work, it affects her husband. He doesn’t work as hard” (96). Makes sense, since why should a man feel that he has to work hard when he has a partner bringing in money too? Likewise, the poor work harder when they feel they have to, and they get lazy when they know they’ll have freebies to fall back on.
Billy and his father both died of cerebral hemorrhage (166, 273). It’s interesting to me that they were both so smart, and their cause of death had to do with the brain.
Billy’s friend Nathan Sharfman “married a beautiful young girl and had a child, and it seemed he had a magnificent life and career ahead. However, he took to drink, lost the wife, and made an outrageous drunken scene at a dinner party” (259). Another example of alcohol ruining everything.
“On June 5, 1917, the federal government passed the Espionage act, which made opposition to the draft or to enlistment punishable by a fine of up to ten thousand dollars and twenty years in prison, and gave the government the power to censor and ban radical literature from the mails. The act was soon broadened to include such crimes as ‘profane, scurrilous, and abusive language,’ and any activities that could be construed as anti-American” (129). I never knew that the US government was so oppressive. I guess what’s going on now isn’t anything new in the US; now it’s just the conservatives turn to get oppressed, whereas back then it was the socialists who got oppressed.
“An Indiana jury took two minutes to acquit a man who shot and killed an alien who had shouted, ‘To hell with the United States!’” (138). Nowadays, it’s patriotism that is unpopular.
Back then, the left wing peacefully protested, and people attacked them. Only the left wing radicals were arrested (139). Nowadays the left gets away with violence, and if the right does any counterprotesting, the right gets blamed for the violence. Any left wingers who get arrested are quickly released.
It was also surprising to me to see evidence of so much lying by the press (58, 228, 275, 276). I thought this was just a modern phenomenon (in the US at least), but I guess not.
“A government not based on the will of the people must, in the nature of things, rule by fear, by keeping the people in constant subjection; and the people will be kept in subjection as long as they can be made to fear” (131).
“According to William’s theory of geographical/political continuity, a people tended to repeat its political history over and over again. For example, the Russians replaced their Tsar with brutal Communist dictators; Americans continually strove for the proud democracy that was their first form of government; and the Nazis were another manifestation of the evil Kaiser’s reign” (262). Interesting. I hope that means that despite the trouble America may be facing right now, that we’ll one day have freedom again.
Billy’s later-in-life manifesto for the American Independence Society which he founded: “We believe that the right of equality, as stated in the Declaration of Independence, does not mean that all persons are exact duplicates of one another, and does not, cannot, imply any sort of forcible leveling, discipline, or regimentation; for such leveling action can provide no equality except that of equal submission to a superior authority, which is in itself the most flagrant denial of equality, liberty, pursuit of happiness, as well as of the requirement of consent of the governed” (204).
November 9, 2015
Perhaps I expected something more from this book than I got and if that is the case, it mirrors the expectations America had for William James Sidis. Born in 1898 to educated immigrant parents, young William's mental acrobatics quickly surpassed their wildest expectations. He supposedly spoke 8 languages by age 8 and even invented his own, Vendergood. He entered Harvard at age 11 and famously lectured to adult scholars on the subject of 4-dimensional bodies. Eventually he would swear off mathematics entirely and he spent his adulthood obsessed with radical politics, ticket transfers for public transport, and New England (particularly Boston) history, even going so far as to write books about Native American tribes of the area.
As with many child prodigies, he was in a pressure cooker from an early age, hounded by reporters and paraded by his parents to their dinner guests. Questions abound regarding what is fact and what is fiction in William's life. Certainly he was incredibly gifted and no doubt achieved much of what was said, but despite Ms. Wallace's best efforts, it never feels like she gets to the truth behind it all. She is hampered by decades having passed and much of the original paperwork missing when she wrote the book.
What is apparent from her surprisingly tender, protective portrait of the man is that he suffered that most horrible of fates which befall the vast number of young prodigies: the struggle to live up to expectations as they mature. The natural human inclination is to expect a superior intellect to produce superior work, and we think these young men and women will push forward the human experience in some way. But this is not only an unreasonable expectation, it often includes an invasion of privacy and deprives them of living a "normal" life out of the public eye.
The book makes it quite clear that William suffered much of this in his all-too-brief life of 46 years. Indeed, he was so damaged by the tribulations of his youth that he shunned the public eye in adulthood and did his best to make people think he had no extraordinary mental gifts. It's difficult to tell how unhappy or lonely he may have been. At times the book makes it seem like his brain was above that type of emotion, then brief passages make him seem very sad indeed.
We will likely never know the entire truth about what was in his head or if he was indeed the smartest American child prodigy who ever lived. It certainly doesn't answer the big question looming over the proceedings: was he always destined to be a uniquely intelligent young man or (as his parents claimed) was their upbringing responsible? I recommend this book for the curious, just don't expect it to bring the man fully into focus when there simply isn't enough extant information to achieve that aim.
As with many child prodigies, he was in a pressure cooker from an early age, hounded by reporters and paraded by his parents to their dinner guests. Questions abound regarding what is fact and what is fiction in William's life. Certainly he was incredibly gifted and no doubt achieved much of what was said, but despite Ms. Wallace's best efforts, it never feels like she gets to the truth behind it all. She is hampered by decades having passed and much of the original paperwork missing when she wrote the book.
What is apparent from her surprisingly tender, protective portrait of the man is that he suffered that most horrible of fates which befall the vast number of young prodigies: the struggle to live up to expectations as they mature. The natural human inclination is to expect a superior intellect to produce superior work, and we think these young men and women will push forward the human experience in some way. But this is not only an unreasonable expectation, it often includes an invasion of privacy and deprives them of living a "normal" life out of the public eye.
The book makes it quite clear that William suffered much of this in his all-too-brief life of 46 years. Indeed, he was so damaged by the tribulations of his youth that he shunned the public eye in adulthood and did his best to make people think he had no extraordinary mental gifts. It's difficult to tell how unhappy or lonely he may have been. At times the book makes it seem like his brain was above that type of emotion, then brief passages make him seem very sad indeed.
We will likely never know the entire truth about what was in his head or if he was indeed the smartest American child prodigy who ever lived. It certainly doesn't answer the big question looming over the proceedings: was he always destined to be a uniquely intelligent young man or (as his parents claimed) was their upbringing responsible? I recommend this book for the curious, just don't expect it to bring the man fully into focus when there simply isn't enough extant information to achieve that aim.
October 22, 2023
Yes and No
We wanted so much to like this book, and it certainly contains much to like. However, it bogs itself down in research. Miss Wallace clearly dug into every corner to provide a well balanced offering, but its 293 pages would have been well-served with a bit more editing. Excerpts from Sidis' writings or those of others about him went on for pages when highlights would have been sufficient. The book often felt like a long but well-written magazine article that was padded out into a book. Again, we applaud Miss Wallace for her balanced bio of this both strange and fascinating young man. But like the man himself, who knows what could have been accomplished if a little less importance was attached to every word and more paid to the bigger picture.
As a footnote, any photos would have been welcomed. (But the book has encouraged us to plan a trip to Portsmouth, NH, to visit the grave and explore the area where the clinic stood.)
We wanted so much to like this book, and it certainly contains much to like. However, it bogs itself down in research. Miss Wallace clearly dug into every corner to provide a well balanced offering, but its 293 pages would have been well-served with a bit more editing. Excerpts from Sidis' writings or those of others about him went on for pages when highlights would have been sufficient. The book often felt like a long but well-written magazine article that was padded out into a book. Again, we applaud Miss Wallace for her balanced bio of this both strange and fascinating young man. But like the man himself, who knows what could have been accomplished if a little less importance was attached to every word and more paid to the bigger picture.
As a footnote, any photos would have been welcomed. (But the book has encouraged us to plan a trip to Portsmouth, NH, to visit the grave and explore the area where the clinic stood.)
July 5, 2016
William Sidis entered Harvard when he was 11, and as adult purpotedly spoke over 40 languages and theorized about 4th dimension. Its a good descriptive book, but i expected more. Children savants are always a fascinating read, especially those that chose to not to pursue their genius due to parental and society pressure.
May 29, 2020
What stroke me is the brillance his parents achieved through an astonishing hardship. I'm wondering if it's even possible to imagine such pain they must have endured with their life from age 1 to age 20. Things like sacrifice, leaving everything behind, tragical death, constant financial pressure, working on crappy jobs in harsh condition. Barely surviving. And still, studying, fulfilling their thirst for knowledge and being educated. It's really: Life breaks you or makes you. They must have ended up so strong making it!
My life is like 1 million times easier than theirs. If I would have been constantly set off my comfort zone like that, I wonder what I would have become. I just have great admiration here. And I feel ashamed for not struggling enough in my life, for not going through the pain that brings everything I value the most in life.
I feel ashamed because, their real story might be distorted here, but still, it gives a glimpse at our ancestor's life. How they struggled for the well-being of the next generations.
I feel ashamed for not giving my very best. It's like, ideally, I prefer to suffer material pain and make my life worthwhile than the reverse.
I don't feel worthwhile of the sweat and suffering of my ancestors, but in a good way, it encourages me to give my best from now on. And as far as I can, to give some contribution for the next generations.
I also got stroke with how detached from material necessities his father was. His unique concern was of the mind. He learned to think while being emprisonned in a rotten cell for two years. And thinking has been his focus for all his life since then.
It reminds me how I don't mind eating or how the material world doesn't concern me when I'm truly in flow with a mind activity. I imagine that x 1000 and for a lifetime. That's truly awesome.
My life is like 1 million times easier than theirs. If I would have been constantly set off my comfort zone like that, I wonder what I would have become. I just have great admiration here. And I feel ashamed for not struggling enough in my life, for not going through the pain that brings everything I value the most in life.
I feel ashamed because, their real story might be distorted here, but still, it gives a glimpse at our ancestor's life. How they struggled for the well-being of the next generations.
I feel ashamed for not giving my very best. It's like, ideally, I prefer to suffer material pain and make my life worthwhile than the reverse.
I don't feel worthwhile of the sweat and suffering of my ancestors, but in a good way, it encourages me to give my best from now on. And as far as I can, to give some contribution for the next generations.
I also got stroke with how detached from material necessities his father was. His unique concern was of the mind. He learned to think while being emprisonned in a rotten cell for two years. And thinking has been his focus for all his life since then.
It reminds me how I don't mind eating or how the material world doesn't concern me when I'm truly in flow with a mind activity. I imagine that x 1000 and for a lifetime. That's truly awesome.
December 13, 2022
As a biography, I think the writer did a good job explaining what he was busy with at any given time of his life. Some reviewers left disappointed remarks because they don’t think the book captures the scope of his intellect and/or made him a “walking disappointment”. I don’t think that is the case. The author continuously defend Sidis’ freedom to do what he wanted with his life and that he didn’t owe anything to society. The author also remembers how his closest friends and relatives felt about him, in the end focusing on how he was liked by them. Aside from that, how could the writer of this biography have made this life story more amazing when he refrained from doing any job where he could have made a breakthrough for an entire field or for humanity - because was incapable of handling it emotionally as a consequence of past traumas or simply by choice - throughout his adult life?
His story is a good reminder that it takes more than intellect to achieve important things, that even the most intelligent people don’t owe their existence to society and how unwelcome society is to people don’t conform.
His story is a good reminder that it takes more than intellect to achieve important things, that even the most intelligent people don’t owe their existence to society and how unwelcome society is to people don’t conform.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 28, 2018
This was an excellent book. It is well worth the read and has many extraordinary stories about Sidis and his failure with society. It goes into much detail about his family and how they used him for popularity. I had never heard of his father Boris before this book and did not know he was ranked beside Freud for a while as one of the most prominent psychiatrists. What was even more interesting was that Sidis helped set precedence in law with two of his lawsuits against the media. He was no doubt an extraordinary human that was sadly driven to isolation due to society's rejection of him, even among intellectuals who were even vastly less intelligent than him.
June 28, 2021
An amazing book about a truly amazing person who I had not even heard of: William Siddis. His achievements are literally awesome: The youngest person to be entered to Harvard University; the ability to speak and read at least 6 languages; a maths whiz who could detect problems with complex formulae in seconds etc. But, like many stratospheric intellects, he succumbed to eccentricities that effectively short circuited his abuility to radically advance our knowledge, which I find very sad. If he had a capable mentor or partner, we may be living differently. The author does a good job in telling his story.
February 24, 2022
William J. Sidis may have been the basis for "Good Will Hunting". Amy Wallace does Sidis justice by presenting him from an objective point of view. God gifted him with tremendous talents (although he did not believe in God). His prodigious talents included linguistics and mathematics. He was a precocious youth who became famous for his abilities, but had few close friends because of his parents never treating him like a child, his eccentricities and his social awkwardness (probably due to the way he was raised). Wallace does a exceptional job portraying Sidis's childhood, education, and life as an adult.
March 12, 2021
I picked up this book after hearing about Sidis and wondering whether stories about his giftedness were overblown. Well, they weren't. And Sidis was much, much more gifted than I though. He was in a class of his own.
The narrative drags sometimes, and perhaps the author dwells too much on the arcana of Sidis' writings, some of which are mindnumbingly dull. She nevertheless does a competent job of telling Sidis' brilliant and tragic life with thoroughness and pathos. The ending is downright heartbreaking.
The narrative drags sometimes, and perhaps the author dwells too much on the arcana of Sidis' writings, some of which are mindnumbingly dull. She nevertheless does a competent job of telling Sidis' brilliant and tragic life with thoroughness and pathos. The ending is downright heartbreaking.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 26, 2024
The Prodigy
William James Sidis was a remarkable human. Born at the end of the 1800’s to extremely intelligent parents, he was a genius with an enormous love of learning, and an estimated IQ of approximately 250. Exploited the majority of his young life by reporters, and to an extent his parents, he chose a different path. It is by turns a fascinating and tragic story of a man who just wanted to live his life peacefully, without the pressure to do what the public felt he owed them. Highly recommend.
William James Sidis was a remarkable human. Born at the end of the 1800’s to extremely intelligent parents, he was a genius with an enormous love of learning, and an estimated IQ of approximately 250. Exploited the majority of his young life by reporters, and to an extent his parents, he chose a different path. It is by turns a fascinating and tragic story of a man who just wanted to live his life peacefully, without the pressure to do what the public felt he owed them. Highly recommend.
March 26, 2021
Overall the book is very elaborate and interesting to read. However there is a clear lack of resources cited, if any. Towards pages 150 the book starts getting depressing, which is interesting to see how everything pieces together. As for the size of the book I would say it’s readable in a short period of time, coming at 270 pages (not including the index).
November 7, 2020
Unbelievable story. Reading newspapers at 3 years old, spoke 4 languages by the age of 8 and at university at 11.
December 20, 2020
What a life. Hardly a waste, as many have claimed.
September 19, 2021
Interesting things about his life since childhood until his death. Clearly a genious, achieved amazing things in one lifetime.
November 2, 2022
Un personaje desconocido y sorprendente
November 2, 2023
It is a good book.
April 16, 2012
William James Sidis was an extraordinary child prodigy. But he was also a shy, gentle and sensitive soul, and all the attention he received frightened him. He felt that he was seen as a freak or curiosity, rather than as a human being. Instead of pursuing a career as a scientist or linguist, he withdrew from the world. We should be concerned with the emotional development of precocious children, not just their intellectual development. Not that our current system of public education devotes many resources to any kind of extra help for gifted children. Sidis reminds me of a current shy genius, Grisha Perelman. Fortunately, Grisha managed to avoid the spotlight until after he completed his great achievement, the proof of the Poincare Conjecture.
Want to read
January 23, 2016I was disappointed. There seemed to be too little information about the man himself, his psychology, etc., at least in the form that I was expecting. I don't remember what it is that she did write, but it was boring enough that I gave up on it. Also, this book costs around $70.
December 25, 2012
Disliked: The biographers slightly irritating personality intrudes a little too much.. A passable treatment of an interesting subject (effects of an intrusive public on a child prodigy & co).
January 20, 2008
Biography of William James Sidis, brilliant child prodigy. Media darling til the press turned hostile and hounded him into obscurity.
November 1, 2020
Sidis comes across as a sympathetic character out of step with his cultural times. Oddball tidbit: he was the cousin of Clifton Fadiman. A good read.
September 3, 2011
Such a remarkable person, but so sad. Who knows what whould have happened, how his life would have gone, with other parents.
November 30, 2011
tells the story it promises to tell, so 5 stars. It's an unforgetable story, too. Get it in a double bundle pack with The Man Who Knew Infinity.
Read
March 6, 2015i want read it
January 31, 2015
I'd never heard of this guy, but guess it proves the theory of nature versus nurture. Kind of sad story.
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