Edison's Ghosts by Katie Spalding

 

Not a novel, this evening, more like a collection of short snarky antihagiographies. The thesis is that geniuses sometimes get out of their comfort zone, and are at least no more likely to make smarter decisions then than are the rest of us. Many of the geniuses are well-known, the stories are all interesting, there are a few that plausibly don't really go any way toward proving her thesis (the story about Maya Angelou comes to mind; and Lord Byron and Ada Lovelace were arguably fighting serious mental illness, which might disqualify some of their behavior from "geniuses acting stupidly") but in spite of that it's an interesting and readable book, with many moments of wry laugh-out-loud humor in it. Dr. Spalding isn't setting out here to kill anyone's idols, the people she writes about mostly come off as more human in their foibles, she doesn't deploy a whole lot of negative judgments.