SUNDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2010


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“I have a Kindle that my briefs are on. You know, I saw that Justice Scalia said that he had them on an iPad and I thought, huh, maybe I should own an iPad.”


SOCIETYREVIEWBYMICHAELS.ROTH


Where does creative genius come from? W


hat do Leonardo da Vinci, Mozart, Darwin, Einstein and VirginiaWoolf have in common? They’re said to be geniuses, supremely tal-


ented people who managed to achieve breakthroughs that other hard-working smart folks only dream about. Where do such breakthroughs, and the people ca- pable of making them, come from? If we understood the essential ingredients of genius, would we be able to create condi- tions conducive to its cultivation? An- drewRobinsonsets out to explorewheth- er the idea of genius can be clearly articulated, or whether we are just left with the notion that“weknowitwhenwe see it.” He explores as case studies the lives and works of 10 extraordinary peo- ple: Christopher Wren, Jean-Francois Champollion, Marie Curie, Henri Carti- er-Bresson and Satyajit Ray, in addition to those mentioned above. Robinson begins by examining previ-


ous attempts to identify the “ingredients of creativity” and finds most of them wanting.He is intrigued by the combina- tion of focus and blindness that charac- terizes idiot savants, for example, but he drops the subject almost entirely after a reviewof some high-profile cases.Happi- ly, he doesn’t trust IQ tests to predict


SUDDEN GENIUS? The Gradual Path to Creative Breakthroughs By Andrew Robinson Oxford Univ. 371 pp. $34.95


genius, nor does he buy the claim that there is any real correlation between mental illness and great creativity. He winds up with the rather banal conclu- sion that “unlike talent . . . genius is the result of a unique configuration of paren- tal genes and personal circumstances.” At the center of “Sudden Genius?” are


chapters devoted to 10 breakthroughs in the arts and sciences. One can appreciate the author’s range of subjects, from Wren’s work on St. Paul’s Cathedral to Champollion’s decoding of the Rosetta Stone to Ray’s innovative work in film. But Robinson’s discussion of the actual breakthroughs themselves is often pe- destrian. We learn little about what has remained so exciting about these famous achievements, nor why he chose these particular exemplars. His use of the secondary literature is haphazard, which is perhaps to be forgiven in light of the variety of work considered. But the au- thor’s passion for these achievements is not always evident, and so the chapters have a tepid feel that undercuts the notion that these are supreme monu- ments to creativity. Robinson seems downright hostile to Virginia Woolf’s work, and I couldn’t help thinking he would have preferred to write about science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, whom Robinson knew and whose name comes up at various points in the book. After the case studies, Robinson turns


back to the search for patterns, and once again what he offers is pretty thin gruel. He is rightly skeptical of generalizations about the hardships or the loving care that the exceptional individuals re-


B7 —Justice Elena Kagan on how she manages the Supreme Court’s “endless reading.”


ceived: “it is truer to say there was a tension or conflict between deprivation and support for each . . . which seems to have proved creative for their work.” Sure, butmuchthesamecould be said for many groups of 10 people working on almost anything at all. Do geniuses often rebel against their schooling? Of course, they do, and that’s why we call their accomplishments “breakthroughs.” After all, the people who have captured Robin- son’s interest produced work that under- mined existing ways of doing things. High schools and universities teach the conventional, and geniuses, as Robinson has defined the term, must break with conventions. To paraphrase philosopher Richard Rorty and the poet Coleridge, geniuses create the taste by which they will be judged, and that often means destroying the old standards of evalua- tion.


“SuddenGenius?” emphasizes that the


major breakthroughs in the arts and sciences look sudden only in retrospect. In fact, years of preparation seem to have been required to nourish the soil out of which the “eureka moment” emerged. As Pasteur said in regard to observation, “chance favors only the prepared mind.” Robinson agrees with the several psy- chologistswhohave noted that at least 10


years of work in the field seem necessary before grand breakthroughs occur. He also makes the important point that although these heroes of art and science knew their stuff, none of them became overspecialized. In other words, they had cultural breadth, which to varying de- grees helped them avoid the trap of mere expertise. The best ideas, he notes, come from versatility as well as focus. That’s a central conviction for those of us work- ing for broadly based liberal learning, and it is more important than ever to remember it as we defend this form of education from those who champion professional specialization and focus. At the close of the book, Robinson


opines that “talent appears to be on the increase, genius on the decrease.” I have no idea how one might evaluate such a claim, but it does sound like the kind of thing people usually say after spending time with the conventional classics. Un- like “Sudden Genius?”, the figures dis- cussed in the book refused to settle for the conventional, and that’s one of the key reasons we continue to ponder their achievements today.


bookworld@washpost.com


Michael S. Roth is the president ofWesleyan University.


3books for giving


With the holiday season in full


swing, here are three gift books to consider giving:


1


HALLMARK: A Century of Car- ing, by Patrick Regan (An- drews McMeel, $40).Most of


us can recite the greeting card giant’s trademark phrase—“When you care enough to send the very best”—by heart. This year marks the firm’s 100th an- niversary, and this generously illustrated his- tory traces the enterprise from theHall fami- ly’s hardscrab- bleNebraska roots to the es- tablishment of theNorfolk Post Card Company in Kansas City, Mo., (which capitalized on the craze for illustrated postcards imported from Europe) and its evolution into Hallmark, a producer and distribu- tor of its own line of ubiquitous greeting cards.


2


HARMONY: A NewWay of Looking at OurWorld, by the Prince ofWales with


Tony Juniper and Ian Skelly (Harp- er, $29.99). In addition to his views on conservation and architecture, for which he has taken some criticism, Prince Charles wants to push what he names a “Sustainabili- ty Revolution.” It’s the crux of his newbook in which he calls for putting na- ture back at the heart of our daily lives. The companion to a documen- tary film and NBC special that aired in theUnited States inNovember, this book has also been adapted for youngsters in the picture book “Har- mony: A Vision for Our Future” (Harper, $16.99).


3


ART&NATURE: Three Cen- turies of Natural History Art from Around theWorld, by


Judith Magee (Greystone, $50). The inspiration for much of this ele- gant, vibrantly illustrated history comes from the Library of the NaturalHisto- ryMuseum, London, which the author has managed for over a decade. Divided into sections (the Americas, Aus- tralasia, Asia, Africa, Europe), it pro- vides natural history images pains- takingly rendered by artists over centuries, which depict newforms of flora and fauna that the European world was just discovering—from the banded krait (a snake) to the white-tailed gnu.


—Christopher Schoppa schoppac@washpost.com


ASSOCIATED PRESS Captured Soviet soldiers march through the snow onNov. 21, 1941.More than 3 million Soviet prisoners of war were deliberately starved to death duringWorldWar II. GENOCIDEREVIEWBYRICHARDRHODES


Caught between two killers T


en years ago I traveled to Belar- us to examine the killing sites of the earlyHolocaust.My host, Stanislav Shushkevich, who had been the new country’s


first head of state, was more than willing to show me the places where SS killers had shot Belorussian Jewish men, wom- en and children into mass graves by the hundreds of thousands — but first he wanted to show me where Soviet killers, just a few years earlier, had murdered hundreds of thousands of other Belorus- sians. My book “Masters of Death” told the story of the early “bullet” Holocaust that pushed out from Germany up throughLatvia anddowninto Ukraine in the wake of the German invasion of the SovietUnion in thesummerof 1941.Now, in a more comprehensive narrative, Yale historian Timothy Snyder enlarges the perspective to include Stalin’s slaughters as well asHitler’s. Snyder identifies three phases of mass


killing in what he chillingly calls the “Bloodlands” of Eastern Europe: deliber- ate mass starvation and shootings in the Soviet Union in the period from 1933 to 1938; mass shootings in occupied Poland more or less equally by Soviet and Ger- man killers in 1939 to 1941; deliberate starvation of 3.1 million Soviet prisoners of war and mass shooting and gassing of morethan 5 million Jewsby theGermans between 1941 and 1945. Snyder estimates the death toll from all this deliberate killing at 14 million. How did Stalin and Hitler justify such slaughter?Were there parallels or commonalities between the two? Stalin forced famine upon Soviet


Ukraine and the Caucasus to collectivize farming, appropriating it to feed the workers as the U.S.S.R. rapidly industri- alized.He did so by authorizing impossi- ble production quotas and confiscating even the seed grain. The millions who starved in their scraped fields in the early 1930s were blamed for their own deaths, their starvation evidence that they had


was from this wretched mass that the SS selected laborers to dig its killing pits and, later, guard its death camps. Debate has long raged among histori-


BLOODLANDS Europe Between Hitler and Stalin By Timothy Snyder Basic. 524 pp. $29.95


deliberately sabotaged production to subvert the government’s plans.Asecond round of mass killing in the late ’30s targeted Stalin’s former associates as well as quotas of random victims, consolidat- ing his power while installing terror as the basic mechanism of state authority. Decapitating the Soviet military by im- prisoning or executing almost all its general officers nearly cost the country its survivalwhenGermany invaded it in a surprise attack in 1941. Hitler imagined the Bloodlands to be


places of colonization, like India and Africa for England, Belgium and France andNativeAmericafor theUnited States. The Poles would be worked to death, the Russians allowed to starve to free up the Bloodlands granary to feed Germans. After the victory, retired SS warrior- farmers would establish utopian agricul- tural colonies to block the Asiatic hordes pressing westward over theUrals.Rather than feed Soviet prisoners of war, of which there were millions, the Wehr- macht callously confined them behind barbed wire without shelter or food; it


ans about the timing of the Final Solution decision. Snyder, inmy opinion correctly, identifies “four distinct versions of the Final Solution” that preceded the actual hecatomb: “the Lublin plan for a [Jew- ish] reservation in eastern Poland,” Jew- ish emigration into the SovietUnion with Stalin’s consent (which he refused), Jew- ish resettlement in Madagascar (which the British navy would have blocked), and forced emigration into the Soviet Union after the German invasion. When these alternatives failed, Hitler in the summer of 1941 ordered the Jews of Europe directly killed because he judged them to be uniquely dangerous. The SS-Einsatzgruppen — special task forces — that Heinrich Himmler sent into Po- land and the SovietUnion in the wake of the German invasion benefited from the jails full of corpses that the Soviet NKVD forces had left behind. “The act of killing Jews as revenge for NKVD executions,” Snyder writes, “confirmed the Nazi un- derstanding of the Soviet Union as a Jewish state . . . . The idea that only Jews served communists was convenient not just for the occupiers but for some of the occupied as well.” Snyder’s research is careful and thor-


ough, his narrativepowerful, if inevitably restrained. His interpretation of the events he describes is less confident, however.He is clear that the influence of “modernity,” as some have theorized, is hardly an adequate explanation for the Holocaust. But in attributing the Nazi shift from shooting to gassing to the gas chamber’s supposedly greater “efficien- cy,” he overlooks the very evidence he cites. The death camps seldom managed as many as 6,000 deaths in a day, while 34,000 were shot to death in Kiev’s Babi Yar ravine in two days in September 1941 and more than 40,000 in Romania “in a few days” that December. Another


40,000 were shot at Maly Trastsianets, one of the sites outside Minsk that Shushkevich took me to see. “Nearly half” of the 5.4 million Jews who died “under German occupation,” Snyder summarizes, died by bullets. Why does the distinction matter? Be-


cause the traumaof direct killing worked destructively on the killers, toHimmler’s great chagrin. They turned drunken, broke down or, worse inHimmler’s view, came to enjoy killing rather than only tolerating it as a grim duty. The death camps with their gas chambers and crematoria made it possible for a few SS officers to direct large-scale killing with minimal contact with the victims; local conscripts, Russian prisoners of war and the Jews themselves suffered the burden of guarding, processing and mass mur- der. That is, the death camps evolved not to kill human beings more efficiently but to limit the trauma of the perpetrators. In that regard the killings were not


much different from the mass firebomb- ings and atomic bombings from high altitude that Britain and the United States perpetrated upon enemy civilians in the course of the war. The Bloodlands of central Europe had their counterparts in the burned-out cities of Germany and Japan with their millions of dead. Almost 10 times as many died on all sides across those six terrible years as died in the Holocaust. It deserves its reputation as the horror of horrors, but there was more widespread horror as well. By including Soviet withGermanmassatrocities in his purview, Timothy Snyder begins the nec- essary but as yet still taboo examination of the full depravity of total war as it was practiced in the 20th century, before the advent of nuclear weapons foreclosed it. Thenext step, forsomeonebrave enough, will be to examine and explain the mass atrocities of the victors. bookworld@washpost.com


Richard Rhodes is the author most recently of “The Twilight of the Bombs.”


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