ONE does not pay for genius in the coin of frustration or unhappiness; Dr. Lewis Terman proves conclusively that 1418 gifted adults — the famous Terman children of twenty-five years ago — are taller, happier, healthier, better adjusted, more happily married, and more successful vocationally than the generality. Now thirty-five years old, with IQ’s ranging from 135 to 200, they are exceptionally well-balanced, normal people. The Gifted Child. Grows Up, written in a straightforward style, peppered with 140 tables, and documented in every possible way ever conceived by a battery of psychologists, summarily destroys the old wives’ tales that exceptional brilliance is coupled with eccentricity, deformity, or perversion.

“The study,” says Dr. Terman, “was not a direct attack upon the pedagogy of gifted children; it was instead a search for basic facts.” The results of this search will be of greatest analytical importance to psychologists and teachers, but it is the lay reader who will reap the most enjoyment from probing into the exceptional mind. But for one chapter of mental measurement statistics and a scattered handful of dull passages, The Gifted Child is fast-moving, absorbing reading, a brilliant summation of Terman’s revolutionary accomplishments in the field of mental tests and measurements.

Dr. Terman’s latest contribution to the now suddenly popular world of the mind is not primarily a psychologist’s book for psychologists; it is rather an Apologia pro Vita Sua to the world, completely a reflection of a man whose exploring mind and dominant personality have carried through a life’s work in a “darkest Africa” area of psychology. He fights his subjects’ battles and strives to protect them from carping criticism. He skips nimbly over minor conclusions which prove embarrassing to genius; some of the data are inconclusive, or are dismissed with a brief “the difference is not reliable” — when the same figure appeared to be highly reliable the page before.

Extremely gifted himself, Terman is not easy to work with; his favorite comment is an explosive “Hell, no!” The Gifted Child is all the more interesting for the personal vagaries of the author. For example, the entire subject of money grates on Terman’s nerves, long made sensitive by constant lack of adequate funds to accomplish this expensive work. Thus, regardless of age or money earned, he considers men in the professional group more successful than those in business, and wryly checks off two Hollywood writers at $20,000 a year as “overpaid.”

Dr. Terman regrets that there are many problems left unsolved amid the abundance of proved and tabulated data and is eagerly looking forward to future studies which will probe further and utilize the rare opportunity this group affords to increase the world’s knowledge of the dynamics of human behavior.

ELIZABETH FARRAH