On Social, Emotional, and Psychosocial Development of Gifted and Talented Individuals

I’m glad I picked this up — it’s an academic study of giftedness and how gifted people, especially children and adolescents, develop. That matters, because gifted youth tend to run cognitively ahead of their peers, and that very advancement can make it hard for them to socialize, to share their emotions, and so on. The book stands in sharp contrast to self-help for gifted adults, like The Gifted Adult or Your Rainforest Mind: rather than self-affirming platitudes, Rinn has a lot to say about what giftedness actually means. Don’t expect many human beings here, though — much of it is a meta-study synthesizing other people’s research, with a fair amount of statistics, modeling, and hypothesizing, and not much human touch. That doesn’t matter; it’s the point. There’s a lot to learn at this level of abstraction, though it might be best paired with other works for a sense of what being “gifted” actually feels like.