Super-Size Me

Size is certainly a preoccupation of Stephen S. Hall's, though his focus in Size Matters is much narrower than Bonner's. Indeed, aside from their unhappily sophomoric titles, these two books have surprisingly little in common. Where Bonner's monograph is sweeping in its breadth, Hall's text is obsessed with height, more specifically human height, and even more specifically his own height. If Bonner's essay is a clearheaded labor of love, Hall's is a somewhat muddled labor of angst and personal suffering.

Hall is 5 feet 5 3/4 inches tall. He tells us this on the book jacket. He also tells us that his wife is 5 feet 9 inches. And he tells us the heights of all five starting players on his high school basketball team, which he remembers all these years later; he also tells us his own height and weight when he was a high school freshman -- 4 feet 9 inches and 82 ½ pounds, according to the school records that he has bothered to research. That was around the time some bullies knocked him down in gym class and muddied his exercise clothes.

That bullying incident was a life-defining moment for Hall. In fact, high school was altogether not a good time for him, and he believes that being small had a lot to do with the emotional traumas that affect him even to this day. Indeed, he is sure that all short boys must have had equally traumatic experiences of puberty, and that they are wandering around as psychologically scarred adults today.

I'm not so sure. Hall himself marshals a huge amount of scientific evidence to undermine his own theory, summed up in the book's subtitle. Time and time again, the author cites data to demonstrate the complexity of the many relationships in play here: between growth and height, height and strength, strength and size and sexual maturity, strength and sexual maturity and aggression, aggression and bullying, victimization and self-esteem, self-esteem and mental health and achievement in life.

Hall is an excellent science writer, with a well-deserved reputation for thoroughness and accuracy. He has demonstrated in previous work his appreciation for nuances of human behavior and the difficulties of behavioral science. The science reporting in Size Matte rs is first-rate, especially the chapters on human growth and the origin of growth charts. It's a shame all this fine reporting doesn't support his overwrought narrative of life as a short man.

But Hall's cultural history of tallness as an ideal of manhood and militarism is fascinating and skillfully done. Particularly instructive is the story of Frederick William, king of Prussia, who in the 18th century collected the tallest men from all over Europe to create his elite troop of guards, the Potsdam Giants. Frederick William himself was just 5 feet 5 inches (a "hairy fireplug of a monarch"), but his foray into eugenics and the marketing of size made him infamous throughout the continent. It's arguable whether what Hall calls the "Prussian curse" was the forerunner of all modern obsession with tallness, but it's a valuable historical lesson for the age of the human genome. In fact, one of Hall's leitmotifs is that, with the advent of genetically engineered human growth hormone, we are already embarked upon a eugenics project to medicalize and treat short but normal children.

In the end, Hall concedes that the most compelling scientific evidence flies in the face of his personal experience and thesis. One wonders why he didn't rewrite the book, or at least change the title and subtitle. Instead, he pulls a "Revenge of the Nerds" switcheroo -- or tries to -- claiming superior psychic strength and higher moral ground because of his small frame. His newfound superiority is no more convincing than the victimhood he adopted at the beginning of the book -- and just as unappealing.

Wray Herbert writes the "Mind Matters" column for Newsweek.com and the "We're Only Human . . . " blog, at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman.