Brooke Allen's second sparkling collection of essays considers the dysfunctional and apparently destructive nature of great talent. In incisive and marvelously entertaining essays, she shows how such liberators as Pepys, Boswell, Sheridan, Jane Austen, Byron, Hawthorne, Thackeray, Bram Stoker, L. Frank Baum, Sinclair Lewis, and William Saroyan were far more daring and disturbing to their time than is the modern mutineer.