About This Book
A first-person narrator recounts his early encounter with an unusually gifted infant and traces the child’s upbringing in a rural milieu, outlining family troubles, mentors, and a voracious, book-centered education. The narrative follows public and private responses as the child’s extraordinary intellect becomes apparent, including examinations, social strain, and the formation of intense personal attachments. The narrator charts his own increasing fascination and dependence, the process of liberation from that dependence, and the wider questions the case provokes about intelligence, social reception, pedagogy, and the enduring mystery surrounding exceptional minds.