Adam Finds His Path in ‘The Overstory’
Adam leaves that science fair disillusioned and cynical, his love of learning extinguished — for a while.
For most of high school, he puts his intelligence to good use doing his classmates’ homework for a fee. He sees only one downside: “He’s forced to learn all kinds of interesting things that shouldn’t interest him.”
That is how he stumbles upon his life’s work, doing someone else’s psychology paper.
Always mystified by his fellow human beings, Adam’s brain lights up with fascination when he happens upon a book called The Ape Inside Us. It details how profoundly faulty our logic is.
What he has always intuited has been confirmed, and suddenly, it all makes sense.
“The mere idea that human behavior — his lifelong nemesis — possesses hidden but knowable patterns as beautiful as anything he once witnessed in insects makes his insides sing.” (Richard Powers)
