The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong by David Shenk

(Doubleday, 320 pages, $26.95)

There’s less hyperbole in this book’s subtitle than you might imagine, said Laura Miller in Salon.com. By thoroughly shredding the common notion that genes provide the “blueprint” for the person that each of us becomes, David Shenk’s cogent and compelling new volume “has quietly blown my mind.” Shenk concentrates on the traits that we think of as talent or intelligence. Innate gifts aren’t what separate Michael Jordan or Albert Einstein from the rest of us, he says; indeed, new research demonstrates that environmental factors strongly influence how genes express themselves. Most people, science tells us, “can come pretty close to the highest levels of achievement” in any field.

Books making similar feel-good claims are hardly unusual, said Jeff Simon in The Buffalo News. But few are as “lavishly documented” as this one. More than half the pages in The Genius in All of Us are given to useful endnotes, and engaging anecdotes enliven the rest. Baseball legend Ted Williams emerges as one of Shenk’s heroes, because the Splendid Splinter ridiculed every suggestion that he might owe his hitting prowess to God-given visual acuity. “A lot of bull,” he’d say. From boyhood, Williams was so determined to become the game’s greatest hitter that he took batting practice until his hands bled. Walking down the street, he’d close one eye to strengthen the vision in the other.

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There are obvious flaws in Shenk’s anything’s-possible argument, said Annie Murphy Paul in The New York Times. It’s unclear where the average person might acquire “the extreme drive” of an Einstein or a Williams. Shenk also never deals squarely with the problem of a boy who spends many years in the batting cage before discovering that he never quite had major-league potential. Still, Shenk’s “deeply interesting” book will convince many readers that the conventional wisdom about talent is due to be overthrown. Shenk gets that revolution “well under way.”