About the Author

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CLAUDIA KALB is an award-winning author and journalist who reports on a wide variety of health and science topics. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder: Inside the Minds of History's Great Personalities. A former senior writer at Newsweek who has also contributed to Smithsonian and Scientific American, Kalb has written cover stories for National Geographic that explore genius through the lens of biography, history, culture, and science. She lives in Alexandria, Virginia. Twitter: @ClaudiaKalb. www.claudiakalb.com

Praise For…

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"Kalb, author of the best seller Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder, brings her award-winning journalistic talent to cover the topic of genius. In Spark, she profiles 12 renowned lives, each of them gifted with intelligence, curiosity, creativity, perseverance, and luck. Intriguingly, the book is organized by the time in the subjects' lives in which genius first stood out.”—Library Journal, starred review

“Spark is an intelligent, condensed history of humanity. In a book that constantly surprises and delights, Claudia Kalb studies brilliantly the origin and nature of creativity--from innate abilities to environmental influences--to provide an overall picture of this fascinating area.”—Diana Widmaier Picasso, art historian and granddaughter of Pablo Picasso

“Claudia Kalb is a masterful storyteller who weaves science with biography to reveal new insights into how passion and purpose emerge. Rigorously and thoroughly readable, Spark is both captivating and enlightening.”—Richard Kogan, concert pianist and psychiatrist, Weill Cornell Medical College

“With insight and fluidity, the great Claudia Kalb plumbs the dimensions and dynamics of genius in a sparkling book that illuminates and inspires. This is a wonderful achievement.”—Jon Meacham, historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer