The academy adapts: David Epstein’s “Range”

By Bart Barry-

Tomorrow, “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World” (Riverhead Books) by David Epstein, author of “The Sports Gene”, will become available to the public.  There is but one mention of a boxer in the book, Vasyl Lomachenko, and this happens on page 8.  Because the subject is an interesting one, though, and because its publisher was kind enough to send me a review copy despite my disclosing both this site’s specialized subject matter and my own tiny readership, what follows is a criticism made in good faith.

The longer this book went on, and the deeper I
found myself in it, the less I enjoyed it. 
Not because of some unsettling truth, some grave misreading of myself or
my life’s choices held up to a mirror’s objective gaze; it was because the book
became increasingly repetitive and predictable.

All the usual suspects gather: Tolstoy, Einstein,
van Gogh, Darwin, Edison, Kasparov, Michelangelo, jazz, NASA, U.S. Armed Forces,
biomimicry-driven animal metaphors (foxes, frogs, birds, hedgehogs, darkhorses),
and lots and lots of PhDs.  Little of the
material written about any of these subjects is new or originally interpreted,
which makes their appearances unfortunate – since much of the rest of the book,
parts that don’t detail academic acclaim or retroactively certified greatness, are
quite enjoyable.

“Range’s” most enjoyable character is Frances
Hesselbein, centenarian and accidental CEO, who doesn’t prove the book’s
central theme, which is to be contrary, so much as give the book something
delightful.  Her primary gift, one
assumes, lies in her adaptability, which may make her a generalist or an
oscillating specialist or a fox or a hedgehog, depending where one finds her in
her history and chooses to place her in his thesis.  She is not a tidy package because she is a mammal,
and few such creatures are tidy packages.

But a celebration of mammalian adaptability is
well-trod already (M. Mitchell Waldrop knocked the subject out of the park 27
years ago with “Complexity”), and so a celebration of anti-specialists, people
who aren’t raised to be automaton prodigies like Tiger Woods, composes a highly
anticipated subject in 2019.  Woods
features prominently in the book’s opening, in a well-crafted, turn-the-clichés-around
sort of commentary that actually, and quite surprisingly, suffers in no way
from his unexpected Masters victory a few months ago – a happening that looked
nigh impossible during the time Epstein wrote “Range”.

Woods, of course, is the prototypical,
10,000-hours-to-mastery mold into which a million vicariously thrilled American
fathers have poured their offsprings’ childhoods since 1997 or so.

But watch how that might itself be turned round:

Eldrick had
an overbearing father.  The boy was
forced to play golf all the time because he had a gift, one his father told
business partners would change the world. 
Eldrick succeeded at a shockingly young age.  His course was set.  He would be the world’s greatest golfer and
the world’s richest golfer, the specialist’s specialist.  But after puberty Eldrick realized he had
another calling.  He spent nearly as many
hours practicing seduction techniques as chipping techniques.  He loved to uncover women like he uncovered
his driver (a tiger head sewn by his mother). 
One day the generalist that he loved to be clashed with the specialist the
world expected him to be.  Sponsors fled,
surgeries followed, he lost hundreds of millions of dollars in a divorce
settlement.  But he continued doggedly on
his generalist quest to prove a balding nerd raised at a country club could be
every bit as promiscuous as an NBA power forward or rock musician.  Some successes and many humiliations later, one
quiet spring afternoon in Georgia, Eldrick “Tiger” Woods became only the second
professional golfer ever to win 15 career majors.

*

The money Americans pay self-help authors creates
a gravity nonfiction authors of all stripes now find irresistible.  Subsequently, there’s something a touch too
glib in most American writing.  Every
character finds his life compressed into Forrest Gump’s.  Epstein appears aware of this and often resists
it.  But gravity remains:

“As a final flourish, with just a few hours of
work, a colleague helped (Gunpei Yokoi) program a clock into the display.  LCD screens were already in wristwatches, and
they figured it would give adults an excuse to buy their ‘Game & Watch’,”
Epstein writes about a generalist Nintendo employee.  Just four sentences later, Epstein completes
the epic thusly: “‘Game & Watch’ remained in production eleven years and
sold 43.4 million units.”

In a 100,000-word book, this is about the same as the
Gumpian invention of the smiley-face t-shirt. 

Ah, but this book is supposed to be t-shaped, rogue,
to make manifest its point about sampling numerous disciplines, represented
here as anecdotes, en route to serendipitous, interdisciplinary breakthroughs!

Well, OK. 
But let’s go all the way with our reconsideration of everything and ask
this entirely relevant question: Why bind all of this in a book when there are
more appropriate media available?

It’s because, in an inversion of its inversion,
this book wants the academy’s approval very much.  This thought happened somewhere in the middle
of an Epstein anecdote: “‘Outsider artists’ are the self-taught jazz masters of
visual art, and the originality of their work can be stunning.  In 2018, the National Gallery of Art featured
a full exhibition dedicated to self-taught artists; art history programs at
Stanford, Duke, Yale, and the Art Institute of Chicago now offer seminars in
outsider art.”

The academy approves, see!

But how very mediocre of it, and how perfectly
backwards.

The intended audience for this book, hyper-educated
professionals who fancy themselves rebellious, should be surprised exceptional
things happen for generations without once appearing in textbooks.  Nobody else will be, though, and certainly
nobody who reads often about our beloved sport.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry