Customer Reviews
A Book About Prodigies by a Prodigy 
2008-05-27
Alissa Quart is an excellent writer of gifted talent, which if for no other reason makes "Hothouse Kids" worth reading. I recommend that the 'Contents' pages are viewed to see what topics are covered (use the "search inside" feature).
Book titles receive different interpretations from different people. From my own point of view, 'hothousing' implies a result-driven focus to harvest the greatest quantity of fruit from a single plant while protecting and alienating the plant from its natural environment, or in other words, forcing a living being to do something that it otherwise would not do. "Hothouse Kids" lives up to its title by clarifying that "The Dilemma of the Gifted Child" can be the result of parents attempting to harvest too much talent from gifted children.
The book's theme is structured on a series of observations and interviews with parents, organizations, teachers, and gifted children themselves. The writing style is lively, colorful, and possesses a quantity of good dry humor. Being written from the viewpoint of having been a child prodigy herself, Quark's choices of phrases reflect her skill as well as her own experiences of having been hothoused.
I purchased "Hothouse Kids" while researching prodigy biographies. It is rare to find a book written by the prodigy him/herself, and for those of us who are interested in hearing the opinions of the prodigy (and not the opinions of non-prodigies who wrongly believe they have an insight into the prodigious mind), it is quite a delight to catch a glimpse into Quart's likes and dislikes. Historically and psychologically, "Hothouse Kids" is an important book, regardless of whether a reader might agree or disagree with the author's opinions.
Modern society places much value in its belief that high intelligence is measurable through IQ tests, and Quart gives ample attention to how the belief is happily endorsed by makers of intelligence tests and educational curriculums. Quart rightly makes light of the "Edutainment" industry that manufactures and sells a wide array of educational toys, DVDs, and other products that claim to increase intelligence.
Two customer reviews at Amazon.com were written by individuals who said that they had been interviewed by Quart. The customers stated that Quart misquoted and altered some comments. It is an unfortunate reality that an author's early manuscript drafts can mysteriously become infested with obviously wrong information, and mistakes do happen, but mistakes are normally caught during the final edit. The full facts behind the customer reviews are unknown to me, and I do not know the extent of errors that might exist relative to the two interviews, but the errors are useful for illustrating two very important natures of all biographies: (1) all authors are human, and all humans make mistakes, and (2) no biography should be ever trusted to be one-hundred percent correct. On page 228, "Hothouse Kids" referenced information about William Sidis that was taken from Amy Wallace's "The Prodigy: A Biography of William James Sidis, America's Greatest Child Prodigy." Readers familiar with "Myths, Facts, and Lies About Prodigies - A Historiography of William James Sidis" will recognize how the historical errors about William Sidis that originated in the early twentieth century were found in "The Prodigy" and are now found in "Hothouse Kids" as well. The errors are not fatal, and the errors about Sidis are not the creation of Quart's, but it is still important to recognize that the errors exist and where they originated.
Over all, the book vividly lives up to its title, and there are several dozen excellent insights that further heighten the book's usefulness. One observation by Quart is from page 205: "One of the things that my research clarified for me was that there are actually very few deeply "gifted" kids with transcendent cognitive or artistic abilities; therefore kids are being incorrectly labeled as exceptionally gifted. The peril is that some children who have been led to believe they are highly gifted will suffer, like Icarus, in their later lives."
"Hothouse Kids" is an especially important book for biographers, all parents who might believe that their children are gifted, and everyone else that might enjoy learning about the 'gifted' industry.
Author stole title directly from a well-known book on childhood psychology 
2008-03-16
How nice to just lift the title of the book directly from an extremely popular book called "The Drama of the Gifted Child." I wonder if the author hoped that she would sell more books based on name-association...How about trying not to steal someone else's title and actually create your own. It makes me wonder what else from the book was stolen....
You do your best parenting before you have kids 2007-08-07
I was disappointed by this book. I know I did my best parenting before I had any kids and I guess Alissa is doing the same. What I expected when I picked up the book and what I got were diametrically opposed. While I am sure there are parents who push their kids too hard, most don't. Rather than concentrate on the minority I'd prefer she give help to the majority, she didn't! I have read many books on the subject and found hers to be the least help of any I've read in the last 16 years!
Interesting but Frustrating 
2007-07-28
The biggest problem I had with the book is that Ms. Quart is childless, so she second-guesses what parents are doing without ever having been in that position herself. I'd like to see whether Ms. "Holier-than-Thou" Quart gets a bit more sympathy when she has her own child(ren). She is obviously very bitter about her own experience as something of a writing prodigy, and that bias colors her writing throughout the book.
She also lumps together a bunch of different issues that don't really have all that much to do with each other. It's like she can't decide what the focus of her book is- true prodigies, garden-variety gifted kids, or the average IQ offspring of affluent parents.
I was particularly disappointed in the chapter on homeschooling. Ms. Quart views homeschooling as always inappropriate "hothousing" even though earlier in the book she discusses how many public schools are cutting back or eliminating gifted programs. Also, she fails to understand that many parents are homeschooling precisely to get away from the unhealthy competitive atmosphere and obsession with external markers of achievement she repeatedly criticizes in her book.
No Dilemma Presented Here 2007-04-16
A dilemma suggests two views, a situation where a difficult choice must be made. The author presents only one view. Over and over again she tells stories of unhappy adults who were paralyzed by the gifted label and the experience of being pushed by extreme parents. While I believe these stories and pain are genuine, I cannot understand why Ms. Quart does not speak of other adults who have thrived, those who look back fondly on their gifted education and the enrichments their parents offered. She mentions the current Spelling Bee pronouncer and former champion, Jacques Bailly. In other venues Bailly has frequently spoken how much he believes in academic competition and how much he enjoyed the experience as a child. But here Bailly is only quoted when he registers a complaint.
Stories of positive experiences never are mentioned. The balance would have made this book live up to the subtitle.
The crucial flaw of the book is that Ms. Quart completely misses the point about gifted children. She speaks of giftedness as something forced on children (or as a classification "bought" by wealthy families.). Anyone who spends time with a truly gifted child knows that the push comes from the child. No parents of a gifted child would ever credit the Baby Einstein videos for their child's intellectual curiousity.
And gifted children do ask for academic pre-schools and weekly trips to the museum, and very much enjoy spending hours in a small room being quizzed by an adult. (This may not be a good thing, but it is a real thing.)
I expected the book to examine the actual dilemma parents face--how much should the parent nurture the child's requests, and how much should the children be encouraged to "just go out and play" even though they resist? By dismissing the key element of the child's desires in this equation, Ms. Quart eliminates any value to her argument.
This book does nothing to help gifted children, nor to guide their parents or teachers.
A challenging book for parents 
2007-03-02
Critically acclaimed author Alissa Quart breaks the news about an issue that will be of urgent concern to parents and educators as well as adult readers with "gifted" pasts: the dilemma of the gifted child. While studies show that children who are superior learners do benefit from enriched early education, the intensely competitive lives of America's gifted and talented kids do have risks. The pressure can have long-term effects in adult life, from debilitating perfectionism to performance anxiety and lifelong feelings of failure.
Quart traveled the country to research the many ways in which the current craze to "produce" gifted kids and prodigies has gone too far. Exploring the overhyped world of baby edutainment and "better baby" early education programs, she takes a hard look at the claims about educational toys and baby sign language. Taking readers inside the ever-more elite world of IQ testing, she reveals the proliferation of new categories of giftedness, including "terrifyingly" and "severely" gifted and examines the true value of such testing. Profiling the explosion of kid competitions-from Scrabble(tm) and chess to child preaching-she uncovers the dangers of such heated pressure to excel so early in life and exposes the prodigy hunters who search science and math fairs for teens to hire for Wall Street investment firms. Critiquing the professionalization of play, she visits with kids who've been identified as prodigies-from a four-year-old painter whose works sell for $300,000, to an eight-year-old professional skateboarder who is backed by nine corporate sponsors. Surveying expert assessments of the necessary role of unstructured play in child development, she warns about the disappearance of recess and the pitfalls of children's overstuffed schedules today. She also profiles the growing divide in opportunities for wealthy kids versus those from middle and lower income families who are losing out as gifted programs at public schools are gutted in the wake of the No Child Left Behind Act.
How should parents and educators draw the line? How much enrichment is too much, and how much is too little? What are we doing to our gifted kids? Alissa Quart's penetrating in-depth examination provides a much-needed wake-up call that will spark a national debate about this urgent issue.
More Opinion Than Fact 2007-02-26
As someone who lived (and, I guess, is still living) the life of a "gifted" person, I'm not terribly surprised by what I found in this book. Many of the problems held by gifted students originate not from parents but from bureaucrats--people who want to figure out how best to control their talents for profit. There isn't much profit for the parents themselves, so where's the profit going to come from? Other than those kids marked by stock brokers and scientists for high-paying jobs, what's left? Political profit, of course, and this is Quart's real goal. Quart simply oppresses her topic into non-existence unless it can produce the right kind of person that will be sure to vote the right way. Scrabble players, spelling bee kids, math geniuses...they're all weird at best and dangerous at worst, *especially* if they've been home-schooled or attend church. Competitors in chess are hyper-competitive, but (surprisingly?) kids participating in politically-charged poetry slams are "encouraging" and "supportive". She weeps for school districts that support the gifted and thereby thwart the "equal results" that certain political groups seek, yet cannot find anything but disdain for programs that support the results of all students simply (and clearly) because of the political party that happened to begin it. Her descriptions of her subjects are caricatured so badly that one cannot have any faith in the descriptions. And, as some have noted below, she has played loose and fast with those she quotes in order to make the right sort of case. If you have the ability to ignore or refute the author's opinions through basic critical-reading skills, you can get a basic idea of the sorts of issues faced by the gifted. If not, look elsewhere.
Only read if you are an overbearing parent with an average kid 2007-02-13
I bought this book in hopes that I would get some information on raising my gifted son. With the book still in my mind, I find it hard to even type the word "gifted" because I don't want to be seen as an elitist. I do agree with much of what she writes regarding the harmfulness of products such as Baby Einstein DVD's and the like, and I can vouch from personal experience that you cannot cause a child to be gifted intellectually. My oldest son is gifted, and when he was born I was only 20 and could not afford expensive educational toys and videos. I also didn't breastfeed him and he went to daycare part-time. I basically did everything wrong but he turned out gifted somehow.
Now that he is 9, he is starting to get the "nerd" comments, so I bought the book thinking that it may help him deal with that. The book makes me feel that I should hide my son from society, teach him that it is not o.k. to be different than the rest, and only speak the work "gifted" with my head hung down in shame.
Meanspirited and misleading 2007-01-13
Whoa! I was expecting a well-written study of the lives and perspectives of
young geniuses and high-IQ adults from this New York Times journalist.
Instead, "Hothouse Kids" insults and distorts the subject and subjects of
study.
The author skewers everyone she meets: parents,"gifted" study educators
and researchers, educational product developers and competitive events
organizers, even the bright children--whom she pities for what she sees as their
their "nerdish freakiness".
A former smart girl herself, the author can't seem to find anyone likeable
in the subculture she has chosen to explore. She pokes fun at how these
people look, the clothes they wear, the cars they drive. One mother of a
brilliant child, for example, has hair "suitable for a Journey music
video." Another walks with a "jerky gait which combines a limp and a
strut". One man has "wiry clown hair", another communicates through
"swaggering body language". A gifted child's build reminds the author of
"Matt Damon on a stretching rack" (whatever that means). Somebody has a
"lazy eye", someone else rolls her eyes (which is, apparently, too "Gen X"),
and a respected leader in the field of gifted education is accused of
dressing like "a mystic". One family's kitchen, where the author was
welcomed, confided in, and provided with food and drink, is criticized as
"rickety--even eccentric". The meal, too, is weird, not up to the author's
standards. Apparently, she finds everyone in the "hothouse" she is studying
to be strange and distasteful.
Several interview subjects for this offensive book have complained of being
misquoted (see other reviews). This is not surprising as the included
quotes typically consist of odd jumbles of disconnected ideas and thoughts
--as if the author had extracted sentences from lengthy interviews and
strung them together out of context.
As the author of more than two dozen nonfiction books, I was shocked and
disheartened by "Hothouse Kids". It is difficult enough for writers to
persuade people to agree to interviews without such a glaring reminder of
the potential for journalistic abuse of power. The process of interviewing
requires trust: that the writer will not use the interviewees' words
against them. If I want to write a book on the subject of high-IQ children,
who in the field would gladly agree to an interview now?
Perhaps the author feels that she has exorcised some of her own disturbed
memories of childhood. Unfortunately, she has added little to the study of
gifted kids while hurting a number of people in the process of vindicating
her own bitterness.
A Great Example of Why Emotional Distance is a Must for Nonfiction 2006-12-19
It quickly became clear that the author felt too strongly and personally about this subject to be clearheaded about it. It suffers from poor reporting, awkward writing, and negligent editing. The way she repeatedly harps on how the kids in the book may be gifted and even enjoying life but they are "geeky" or "not cool" is juvenile and ridiculous. She should have written a memoir first.
It's too bad because this is a book that is begging to be written properly. The subject is very timely.
