Russ Rymer is the author of the novel Paris Twilight (2013). His nonfiction books include Genie: A Scientific Tragedy (1993), which became a NOVA television documentary and was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award, and American Beach: A Saga of Race, Wealth, and Memory (1999), which was nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book of the Year Award and named a New York Times Notable Book. Rymer has contributed articles to The New Yorker, National Geographic, Harper’s, Atlantic, and the New York Times Magazine.
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GenieA Scientific Tragedy
The ensuing inquiries found the girl to be a teenager, though she weighed only fifty-nine pounds and was only fifty-four inches tall. She was in much worse physical shape than at first suspected: she was incontinent, could not chew solid food and could hardly swallow, could not focus her eyes beyond twelve feet, and, according to some accounts, could not cry. She salivated constantly, spat indiscriminately. She had a ring of hard callus around her buttocks, and she had two nearly complete sets of teeth. Her hair was thin. She could not hop, skip, climb, or do anything requiring the full extension of her limbs. She showed no perception of hot or cold.
Genie:A Scientific Tragedy -
GenieA Scientific Tragedy
One thing that normal children learn quickly is how to form a negative sentence. They begin by saying “No have toy,” and proceed directly to the next stage, where they bury the negation within the sentence: “I not have toy.” Then they figure out how to use a supporting verb and say, “I do not have a toy,” and the prodigies contract the verb to “don’t.” Genie stayed stuck at the “No have toy” stage for almost three years, and four years after she was talking in strings she was still speaking in the abbreviated nongrammar of a telegram.
Genie:A Scientific Tragedy -
GenieA Scientific Tragedy
According to Rigler, “the lady running one of the foster homes was rather bizarre.” He recalled visiting the home “from time to time” and counseling Genie in her occasional outpatient visits to Childrens Hospital. “The woman was very rigid, and Genie had a powerfully strong will,” he said. “Ultimately, the collision occurred over the issue of her toilet behavior. What happened in this home was that she became constipated, and this got to the point where it was very painful. The woman tried to extract fecal matter with an ice-cream stick. There was no injury. But she was traumatized.”
Genie:A Scientific Tragedy
“Russ Rymer's Genie is a haunting, harrowing, compulsively readable book . . . Rymer turns the science in Genie into a detective story, and it's an exciting one. Meanwhile, the human element plays out like a Greek tragedy . . . The primary achievement of Rymer's book, finally, is that he shows us why people care so much. One after another, those who knew Genie paint a picture of a vibrant, intelligent, lovable young woman trying to communicate in a world where every language is foreign to her.” —Chicago Tribune
“His brief text is a rarity among popular science books, a lusciously written page-turner. It is gripping not only because the reader is driven to learn what happens next to the abused girl, whom we quickly come to care about, but because Mr. Rymer asks how the brain masters language. He deftly lays out how the brain constructs the framework that will be both cage and key to consciousness—for language both imprisons us and is our only means of complex communication.” —The New York Times [on Genie]
“American Beach does not proceed in a straightforward manner. Instead, it engagingly loops, advancing backward and forward in time, through anecdotes, formal and informal histories, interviews and descriptions . . . American Beach is filled with moving and often terrifying stories, fascinating history and vivid portraits. In the end, it is a model of what a serious, sustained conversation on race might be: a conversation in which the participants were willing to finger the jagged grain of race and American history, perhaps discovering in the process the future of all of us.” —Chicago Tribune
Selected Works
