The Prodigy
A Biography of William James Sidis, America's Greatest Child Prodigy
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Narrated by:
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Aze Fellner
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By:
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Amy Wallace
About this listen
William Sidis, 1897-1944, was the world's greatest child prodigy. His IQ was an estiamted 50 to 100 points higher than Einstein's, the highest ever recorded or estimated. His father, a pioneer in the field of abnormal psychology, believed that he and his wife could create a genius in the cradle. They hung alphabet blocks over the baby's crib-and within six months little Billy was speaking. At 18 months he was reading The New York Times; at three, Homer in the original Greek. At six he spoke at least seven languages.
Told with flair and insight ... this is his story.
©1986, 2011 Amy Wallace (P)2011 David N. WilsonListeners also enjoyed...
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In his novels and short stories, Gabriel García Márquez has transformed the particulars of his own life and the lives of his fellow Colombians into wondrous fiction. While telling the story of the sloppily dressed, skinny young man who rose from obscurity as a provincial journalist to international fame as the progenitor of a new literature, Gerald Martin also considers the tensions in García Márquez's life between celebrity and the personal quest for literary quality, between politics and writing, and between the seductions of power, solitude, and love.
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Great content, somewhat disappointing narrator.
- By Paola Herrington on 01-08-13
By: Gerald Martin
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Emily Post
- Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners
- By: Laura Claridge
- Narrated by: Christine Williams
- Length: 18 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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From the excesses of the late 19th-century Gilded Age, through the horrors of World War I, to the transformations of the Roaring 20s that gave birth to her magisterial Etiquette, Emily Post unfailingly took the measure of her era. A Baltimore blue blood with a populist heart, she helped the masses live the American dream with her hugely popular book, which has been continuously in print for over 85 years.
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Typical for Emily Post
- By Stephanie on 01-07-19
By: Laura Claridge
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Endgame
- Bobby Fischer’s Remarkable Rise and Fall—from America’s Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness
- By: Frank Brady
- Narrated by: Ray Porter
- Length: 13 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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From Frank Brady, who wrote one of the best-selling books on Bobby Fischer of all time and who was himself a friend of Fischer’s, comes an impressively researched biography that for the first time completely captures the remarkable arc of Bobby Fischer’s life. When Bobby Fischer passed away in January 2008, he left behind a confounding legacy. Everyone knew the basics of his life—he began as a brilliant youngster, then became the pride of American chess, then took a sharp turn, struggling with paranoia and mental illness. But nobody truly understood him.
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A Trajedy
- By Roy on 02-27-11
By: Frank Brady
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Bringing Down the Colonel
- A Sex Scandal of the Gilded Age, and the "Powerless" Woman Who Took On Washington
- By: Patricia Miller
- Narrated by: Christina Delaine
- Length: 13 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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In Bringing Down the Colonel, journalist Patricia Miller tells the story of Madeline Pollard, an unlikely 19th-century women’s rights crusader. After an affair with a prominent politician left her “ruined”, Pollard brought the man - and the hypocrisy of America’s control of women’s sexuality - to trial. And, surprisingly, she won.
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Stay with it. It is amazing.
- By Living Downeast on 09-29-19
By: Patricia Miller
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Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know
- By: Colm Toibin
- Narrated by: Colm Toibin
- Length: 6 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Elegant, profound, and riveting, Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know illuminates not only the complex relationships between three of the greatest writers in the English language and their fathers, but also illustrates the surprising ways these men surface in their work. Through these stories of fathers and sons, Tóibín recounts the resistance to English cultural domination, the birth of modern Irish cultural identity, and the extraordinary contributions of these complex and masterful authors.
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Eminently re-readable
- By Ellen-A on 01-02-19
By: Colm Toibin
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Empire of Self
- A Life of Gore Vidal
- By: Jay Parini
- Narrated by: John Lescault
- Length: 16 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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The product of 30 years of friendship and conversation, Jay Parini's Empire of Self probes behind the glittering surface of Gore Vidal's colorful life to reveal the complex emotional and sexual truth underlying his celebrity-strewn life. But there is plenty of glittering surface as well - a virtual who's who of the American Century, from Eleanor Roosevelt and Amelia Earhart through the Kennedys, Princess Margaret, and the creme de la creme of Hollywood.
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Well done!
- By Christopher on 03-22-16
By: Jay Parini
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Inga
- Kennedy's Great Love, Hitler's Perfect Beauty, and J. Edgar Hoover's Prime Suspect
- By: Scott Farris
- Narrated by: Scott Farris
- Length: 12 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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In addition to her romance with Kennedy, Arvad married four times - including to an Egyptian prince, the brilliant filmmaker Paul Fejos, and the famed cowboy movie star Tim McCoy. She had affairs with Wall Street financier Bernard Baruch, the noted surgeon Dr. William Cahan, and Winston Churchill's right hand man, Baron Robert Boothby. But by all accounts her admirers among the European and American elite loved Inga not for her physical beauty, but for her joie de vivre.
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Excellent Kennedy Read
- By James P. Barraza on 04-14-17
By: Scott Farris
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Guest of Honor
- Booker T. Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, and the White House Dinner that Shocked a Nation
- By: Deborah Davis
- Narrated by: Karen White
- Length: 9 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to have dinner at the executive mansion with the First Family. The next morning, news that the president had dined with a Black man-and former slave-sent shock waves through the nation. Although African Americans had helped build the White House and had worked for most of the presidents, not a single one had ever been invited to dine there. Fueled by inflammatory newspaper articles, political cartoons, and even vulgar songs, the scandal escalated.
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Great So
- By Maureen Monahan on 04-11-21
By: Deborah Davis
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Passing Strange
- A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line
- By: Martha A. Sandweiss
- Narrated by: Lorna Raver
- Length: 14 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Brilliant scientist and witty conversationalist, best-selling author and architect of the great surveys that mapped the West after the Civil War, Clarence King was named by John Hay "the best and brightest of his generation". But King hid a secret from his Gilded Age cohorts and prominent family in Newport: for 13 years he lived a double life - as the celebrated White explorer, geologist, and writer Clarence King and as a Black Pullman porter and steelworker named James Todd.
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Race and Identity
- By Roy on 03-22-10
What listeners say about The Prodigy
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Amazon Customer
- 12-23-21
good listen
very interesting story . a story of a child prodigy brought down by media. it
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- D. Jones
- 08-19-16
Well written...
...but repetitive in places. It was clear to me that WJ Sidis was a genius, but also had a high functioning form of Autism. This book would have better served to have at least included this as a possibility, especially in the epilogue when the author explored the real reasons for his misunderstood life. It would have been interesting had he been born into today's world. The unfortunate thing would have been in today's nationalism and prejudice, he may have been treated much the same way. Today too is the tendency for a conservative nationalistic trend to denigrate intellectualism, just as Billy experienced in his time. He would have been a great person to know.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Tom B.
- 05-13-12
A tarnished national treasure lost forever
Where does The Prodigy rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
Among biographies, this book ranks highly and is very thorough in its treatment of the subject. A very worthwhile listen and the best that I've heard this year.
What was the most compelling aspect of this narrative?
The relationship with his sister Helena was perhaps the most uplifting as she was the one person in the family who never turned her back on her brother.
What does Aze Fellner bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
He does a very good job of keeping the listener enthralled throughout the telling of the story. There are only two small slips of the audio whereby a sentence is repeated twice.
Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?
The book kept me captivated throughout and also served as a cautionary tale for me as a father.
Any additional comments?
The author is almost completely silent on why the father was never mentioned again, either positively or negatively after his passing. This was surprising, since the relationship seems to have been much stronger than that of the one between William and his mother.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Douglas
- 09-10-18
Amazing Biography...
of perhaps the greatest scientific and mathematical genius of all time--and how his parents and a malicious press made it all go terribly wrong. An enlightening and sobering read.
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3 people found this helpful
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- rodrigober
- 11-30-15
Great book
Great book of a personal hero I love the story and the deep of the information
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1 person found this helpful
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- oliverVT
- 08-22-22
Intriguing
A really interesting story about a man who could have been so much more if only the media and others let him be.
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- Dal
- 08-06-12
The Human Brain is a Complex Thing
What happened to William James Sidis is not surprising. Sad, yes, but nothing as complex as the human brain can be predictable. He had great potential as a child but so did Bobby Fischer, the greatest chess player of all time. Both, after amazing feats of brilliance, burned out. "Endgame" can be found at Audible.
If you get a chance, listen to both "The Prodigy" and "Endgame" and compare these two brilliant, but ultimately tragic men. There are many similar examples.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Anonymous
- 08-14-21
Fascinating story that reads like a novel.
This is the story of a man with an IQ of around 300. The story flows like a steady stream carrying the characters forward through personal whirlpools. The narrator is a gifted storyteller.
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- Cormac Canales
- 08-01-20
Both an inspiration and a caution
The story was simultaneously interesting, inspirational, and sad.
The narration was OK. A few times a sentence was repeated in its entirety, but I don’t know if that was because of a misprint in the book itself, or clumsy narration. But it wasn’t too bothersome.
WJS’s story is recommended for those who hope to one day raise an exceptional or above average child through “nurture”: both as a partial guide (some of the “Sidis Method” remains good advice for a child’s intellectual growth), and a cautionary tale.
It can also serve those who were raised by such parents and yet grew up to disappointingly not “reach their potential” (as I was, which is probably why I had tears in my eyes when the point of WJS’s death was reached—after 10 hours, I felt like I’d lost a brother).
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2 people found this helpful
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- John A.
- 07-11-22
A fantastic book
A wonderful book that I found to be developmental and maturative for a young man coming of age such as myself. I found incredible relation and parallel with the protagonist and I further highly recommend this book.
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