Author: Claudia Kalb

Claudia Kalb is an award-winning journalist and author of the New York Times bestseller Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder: Inside the Minds of History’s Great Personalities. In her recent tome, Spark: How Genius Ignites, From Child Prodigies to Late Bloomers, she takes her readers on a journey concerning thirteen outstanding personalities, Picasso, Shirley Temple, Yo-Yo Ma, Bill Gates, Isaac Newton, Sara Blakely, Julia Child, Maya Angelou, Alexander Fleming, Eleanor Roosevelt, Peter Mark Roget, Grandma Moses, and Leonardo da Vinci.

In her introduction, Kalb poses several compelling questions: What role do our personalities have on the lives we pursue? Are we born with specific skills, or are we lured by our passions? How do we discover the spark that feeds our souls, and how do we recognize we discovered it? What drives some individuals to achieve incredible creative heights early in their lives while others identify it decades later? With these queries in mind, Kalb sets out to explore the thirteen iconic figures, and her findings are pretty remarkable.

The book’s chapters are organized by the ages the genius ignites rather than by birth order. Beginning with Pablo Picasso, we learn that he amazingly communicated with pictures before he could speak! Shirley Temple was a box office sensation by the age of six.

At the other end, we have Grandma Moses, the painter, who became known at seventy-seven. As Kalb points out, “her destiny was molded not by choice but by circumstances.” She only picked up a paintbrush when she was in her 70s when she began painting. As remarked, she is “the quintessential late bloomer, a woman whose singular career kicked off not only belatedly but in the eighth decade of her life.”

Kalb informs her readers that she examined these exceptional people through her journalistic lens, as she interviewed and reported on-site where feasible. This was reinforced by her researching letters, memoirs, and biographies. And where available, she also communicated with family members of these historical personalities. She even drew on a conversation she had with Ma for a magazine feature. She interviewed both Bill Gates and the entrepreneur, Sara Blakely.

The hunt for answers to her questions turned out to be rather complicated, and there were no straightforward answers. As mentioned, many books seek to explain human virtuosity. In the book, Kalb interprets the term with some elbow room. The contributions of some of these individuals may be so gigantic and sustaining that there no words or adjectives that could precisely describe them. For centuries philosophers have debated what makes up genius and how does it emerge. Is it a gift from the gods as Plato believed or as Aristotelian thinkers believed it was biological?

Kalb provides a treasure of background detail that provides fascinating information into the lives of these amazing people, and as she mentions, she hopes that “it will leave readers with a renewed intention to embrace their own genius and offer it compassionately to others.”