Dave's book review for The Genius Myth

Just a quick review for this one. I really appreciate what I took to be the main premise of this book: It’s perfectly fine to say that some people have "a genius" for something and may create "works of genius", but that’s different from calling them "geniuses" and treating them as a special class of people. The problem with creating special classes of people is that you end up trying to classify people in unhelpful/gross/dangerous ways and there’s a tendency to let a "genius" get away with terrible behavior because they are special.

I completely agree.

I have big quibbles with the way Lewis portrayed certain figures (I think some of them were/are way worse than she paints them), but to add specific examples would derail the review.

This book is very "lumpy". Lewis is highly specific and detailed with some biographies and extremely vague and hand-wavy on others. There’s some repetition that I didn’t feel reinforced any point particularly well.

Also, I think the book will suffer from being a little too timely. New things have come to light in the year between the publishing date and when I read it.