BEYOND GENIUS

Biographies of five of history’s greatest minds.

Atalay, an artist and former member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, explores the lives of Shakespeare, Leonardo, Beethoven, Newton, and Einstein. Readers will enjoy his account of their accomplishments, accompanied by portraits of rival immortals who didn’t make the cut. To justify his choices, Atalay muses about genius itself, emphasizing that prodigies tend to be eccentric, difficult, and even mentally ill. He divides geniuses into three categories. Ordinary geniuses “follow the rugged topography of logic…to reach the summit of their remarkable achievements.” They are surpassed by the magicians, who study on their own and “gain the erudition that will shake the intellectual world.” Transcending even them are transformative geniuses, who “appear to leap from one summit to another, their creative efforts altogether redefining existing disciplines.” Atalay has no doubt that his five transformers represent the peak of human achievement. His biographies of the chosen five (and many competing geniuses) are only the tips of the iceberg. Delving deeply into each man’s work, he investigates the science behind the art and the art behind the science. Art-supply stores did not exist until the 19th century, so artists mixed pigments from scratch and often made their own tools. All were well versed in mathematics, which shaped their use of perspective, the proportions of their figures, and, for composers, the structure of their compositions. The basics of Newton’s and Einstein’s laws are not difficult to explain, as Dennis Overbye and Abraham Pais have proven with books on Einstein, and Michael White and James Gleick with equally fine assessments of Newton. Ataley’s detailed descriptions, by contrast, may overwhelm readers not familiar with college physics, although his digressions into phrenology, Einstein’s brain, geniuses' physical maladies, and rankings of various sorts of greatness throughout history are entertaining and modestly enlightening.

A well-informed deep dive into genius.