Robert W. Weisberg discusses the Beatles-and computes the hours they spent practicing-in "Creativity and Knowledge: A Challenge to Theories" in Handbook of Creativity, ed. Robert J. Sternberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999): 226250.

The complete list of the richest people in history can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealthy_historical_figures_2008.

The reference to C. Wright Mills in the footnote comes from The American Business Elite: A Collective Portrait, published in the Journal of Economic History 5 (December 1945): 2044.

Steve Jobs's pursuit of Bill Hewlett is described in Lee Butcher's Accidental Millionaire: The Rise and Fall of Steve Jobs at Apple Computer (New York: Paragon House, 1987).

THREE: THE TROUBLE WITH GENIUSES, PART 1

The episode of 1 vs. 100 featuring Chris Langan aired January 25, 2008.

Leta Hollingworth, who is mentioned in the footnote, published her account of "L" in Children Above 180 IQ (New York: World Books, 1942).

Among other excellent sources on the life and times of Lewis Terman are Henry L. Minton, "Charting Life History: Lewis M. Terman's Study of the Gifted" in The Rise of Experimentation in American Psychology, ed. Jill G. Morawski (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); Joel N. Shurkin, Terman's Kids (New York: Little, Brown, 1992); and May Seagoe, Terman and the Gifted (Los Altos: Kauffman, 1975). The discussion of Henry Cowell comes from Seagoe.

Liam Hudson's discussion of the limitations of IQ tests can be found in Contrary Imaginations: A Psychological Study of the English Schoolboy (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1967). Hudson is an absolute delight to read.

The Michigan Law School study "Michigan's Minority Graduates in Practice: The River Runs Through Law School," written by Richard O. Lempert, David L. Chambers, and Terry K. Adams, appears in Law and Social Inquiry 25, no. 2 (2000).

Pitirim Sorokin's rebuttal to Terman was published in Fads and Foibles in Modern Sociology and Related Sciences (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1956).

FOUR: THE TROUBLE WITH GENIUSES, PART 2

Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Knopf, 2005).

Robert J. Sternberg has written widely on practical intelligence and similar subjects. For a good, nonacademic account, see Successful Intelligence: How Practical and Creative Intelligence Determine Success in Life (New York: Plume, 1997).

As should be obvious, I loved Annette Lareau's book. It is well worth reading, as I have only begun to outline her argument from Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

Another excellent discussion of the difficulties in focusing solely on IQ is Stephen J. Ceci's On Intelligence: A Bioecological Treatise on Intellectual Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).

For a gentle but critical assessment of Terman's study, see "The Vanishing Genius: Lewis Terman and the Stanford Study" by Gretchen Kreuter. It was published in the History of Education Quarterly 2, no. 1 (March 1962): 618.

FIVE: THE THREE LESSONS OF JOE FLOM

The definitive history of Skadden, Arps and the takeover culture was written by Lincoln Caplan, Skadden: Power, Money, and the Rise of a Legal Empire (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1993).

Alexander Bickel's obituary ran in the New York Times on November 8, 1974. The transcript of his interview is from the American Jewish Committee's oral history project, which is archived at the New York Public Library.

Erwin O. Smigel writes about New York's old white-shoe law firms in The Wall Street Lawyer: Professional Organization Man? (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969). Their particular employee preferences are listed on page 37.

Louis Auchincloss has written more about the changes that took place in the old-line law firms of Manhattan in the postwar years than anyone. The quotation is from his book The Scarlet Letters (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), p. 153.

The economic annihilation faced by lawyers at the lower end of the social spectrum during the Depression is explored in Jerold S. Auerbach's Unequal Justice: Lawyers and Social Change in Modern America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 159.

Statistics on the fluctuating birth rate in America during the twentieth century can be found at http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005067.html.

The impact of the "demographic trough" is explored in Richard A. Easterlin's Birth and Fortune: The Impact of Numbers on Personal Welfare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). H. Scott Gordon's paean to the circumstances of children born during a trough is from p. 4 of his presidential address to the Western Economic Association at the annual meeting in Anaheim, California, in June of 1977, "On Being Demographically Lucky: The Optimum Time to Be Born." It is quoted on page 31.

For a definitive account of the rise of Jewish lawyers, see Eli Wald, "The Rise and Fall of the WASP and Jewish Law Firms," Stanford Law Review 60, no. 6 (2008): 1803.

The story of the Borgenichts was told by Louis to Harold H. Friedman and published as The Happiest Man: The Life of Louis Borgenicht (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1942).

For more on the various occupations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century immigrants to America, read Thomas Kessner's The Golden Door: Italian and Jewish Immigrant Mobility in New York City 18801915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).

Stephen Steinberg's The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1982) includes a brilliant chapter on Jewish immigrants to New York, to which I am heavily indebted.

Louise Farkas's research was part of her master's thesis at Queen's college: Louise Farkas, "Occupational Genealogies of Jews in Eastern Europe and America, 18801924 (New York: Queens College Spring Thesis, 1982).

SIX: HARLAN, KENTUCKY

Harry M. Caudill wrote about Kentucky, its beauty and its troubles, in Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962).

The impact of coal mining on Harlan County is examined in "Social Disorganization and Reorganization in Harlan County, Kentucky," by Paul Frederick Cressey in American Sociological Review 14, no. 3 (June 1949): 389394.

The bloody and complicated Turner-Howard feud is described, along with other Kentucky feuds, in John Ed Pearce's marvelously entertaining Days of Darkness: The Feuds of Eastern Kentucky (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994), p. 11.

The same clashes are assessed from an anthropological perspective by Keith F. Otterbein in "Five Feuds: An Analysis of Homicides in Eastern Kentucky in the Late Nineteenth Century," American Anthropologist 102, no. 2 (June 2000): 231243.

J. K. Campbell's essay "Honour and the Devil" appeared in J. G. Peristiany (ed.), Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).

The Scotch-Irish ancestry of the southern backcountry, as well as a phonetic guide to Scotch-Irish speech, can be found in David Hackett Fischer's monumental study of early American history, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 652.

The high murder rate in the South, and the specific nature of these murders, is discussed by John Shelton Reed in One South: An Ethnic Approach to Regional Culture (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982). See, particularly, chapter 11, "Below the Smith and Wesson Line."

For more on the historical causes of the southern temperament and the insult experiment at the University of Michigan, see Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South, by Richard E. Nisbett and Dov Cohen (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, Inc., 1996).

Raymond D. Gastil's study on the correlation between "southernness" and the US murder rate, "Homicide and a Regional Culture of Violence," was published in the American Sociological Review 36 (1971): 412427.