In September I got an email from Lacy (who worked with Prufrock Press) asking me to provide a list of potential reviewers for my upcoming book. I naturally thought of Larry. But Lacy’s reply put me in disbelief: Larry could not review my book anymore; Larry had passed away.

I have to confess that when I first got acquainted with Larry, it was not a pleasant experience. That was back in the mid-1990s, when I was still a graduate student. I submitted a paper I had co-authored with my advisor John Feldhusen to the Journal for the Education of the Gifted, of which Larry was the editor. I was discouraged by Larry’s feedback, which, as can be imagined, was not that positive. “Larry tends to be critical,” Dr. Feldhusen tried to comfort me. This was how I got to know Larry. Of course, after a couple of rounds of revision, the paper was published.

A couple of years later, when I had just joined the faculty of the State University of New York at Albany, I submitted a review paper on gifted girls’ motivation. To my surprise, Larry gave me lots of encouragement on that piece, and indeed he praised me so lavishly that I feared I could not live up to his expectations. This was the first time I found Larry to be very approachable, and indeed he did not spare nice words on people.

A couple of years later, Larry and I had submitted separate proposals for the annual convention of the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC), and both were accepted as part of the same poster session. I remember Larry’s presentation was about expertise in filmmaking. Although we both felt our proposals deserved a paper session (as we always do!), Larry still carried his signature smile, and we stood there before the poster board, chatting about how the knowledge of domain expertise can inform us about gifted education. Naturally, when I had an idea about a special issue on the nature and nurture of exceptional competence, I thought of Larry’s journal immediately. Larry accepted the proposal. The special issue featured Simonton, Ericsson, Ceci, and Lohman, among others, as authors, as well as an introduction and epilogue articles I co-authored with Larry. The project became the first and last collaboration I would make with Larry.

Since then, the professional relationship between me and Larry turned into a personal friendship. We often came across each other between sessions at the NAGC or American Educational Research Association (AERA), and we would stop to have a brief chat on our way to our next sessions, or I would simply skip one to enjoy his company. I used to think Tracy (Larry’s close friend and collaborator) would be jealous, but I knew later how popular Larry was; many of us liked to hang out with him. Larry and I chatted about Tai-Chi, which he had practiced for decades. I used to practice Tai-Chi daily but had quit when I came to this country more than thirty years ago, and I was quite surprised to know someone like Larry had a life-long passion for this mind–body exercise. In 2007 I told Larry I had voted for the first time in my life as a new citizen of the USA, and I told him how I had picked the presidential candidate. Larry said it was hard for someone like me (namely, an “outsider”) to assess candidates without substantial background knowledge as to where they come from and whom they stand for. By that he meant the American political history, particularly the part less known to new immigrants like me. Obviously, Larry had a lot of insider’s stories I do not know. I later discovered that, when Larry was a child, his father was chased by the FBI for the suspicion that he was a communist, which caused a lot of distress in his family. This partly explains why Larry in his whole adulthood was a civil rights activist and a strong champion of world peace.

Larry was a maverick when it came to scholarship. He had strong beliefs, including a strong critical stance on the orthodox empirical-analytic approach (reductive causal inferences without experiential basis). I once mentioned to Larry that the lack of contact with practitioners working “in the trenches” may have disadvantaged me, and I should probably gain more practical experiences in the field by immersing myself in gifted programs. “Really?” he responded, “I don’t think so.” Larry did not agree with me. His feeling seemed to be that some detachment is not necessarily a bad thing, and solitude and reflection are essential ingredients of scholarship. He continued his musing that even some distance from the institutional establishments is beneficial.

Larry preferred qualitative research. He went to Indiana Academy and spent months observing academically talented adolescents in their daily life. In his book Nurturing Talent in High School: Life in the Fast Lane, he meticulously generated the ethnography of the daily life of those students of the academy. As mentioned in the introduction to his book, Larry was intrigued by David Henry Feldman’s notion of “nonuniversal development” (an inspiration for ECT delineated in this book as well) and Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development, which I also resort to in support of the role of culture evident in this book. Larry was convinced that the most valuable work in our field lies in understanding contexts wherein gifted minds grow in their distinct ways. Larry was very focused (that might have had something to do with his love of Tai-Chi). After reading his book (which he gave me as a gift) recounting his insightful observations, I knew he meant business. Now I understand what my advisor John Feldhusen had really meant when he had said Larry tended to be critical. Larry could be harsh, sometimes even unrelentingly so, because he was truly serious about the scholarship, research, and practice he was engaged in.

In the meantime, Larry had his own biases. Larry was wary of the positivist research tradition that generates lots of numbers and statistics but little in the way of intimate knowledge of people, their struggles and triumphs, their aspirations and sorrows. I guess that is why he preferred field research to lab research. This cultural-critical stance might also have had to do with his life experiences; in scholarship as well as in life, the search for meaning, human agency, and justice is always more important than that for the technical rationality of determining the most efficient way to get things done. To him, by taking the empirical-analytic approach, one can lose touch with rich human experiences, and can even unduly ignore the richness and complexity of realities with the excuse of honoring “scientific rigor.” Larry’s sentiment resonates with me, as I have also been trying, under the influence of Jerome Bruner, to distinguish “human sciences” from “natural sciences.”

Larry’s warmth showed through when I got to know more about him, such as his compassion for people and his efforts to organize youth activities and inspire young generations. Larry also had a natural sense of humor. I remember how Larry and I sat together in a plenary panel session at an NAGC convention participated in by Joe Renzulli, Bob Sternberg, and Howard Gardner (Gardner attended the session via Skype), moderated by Carolyn Callahan. Larry later chatted with me about the panel members’ presentation styles. He particularly commented on Bob Sternberg’s humor. Indeed, Bob is quite charismatic in that regard, never forgetting to crack some jokes at his own expense during his presentations, showing his quick wit and spontaneity. Larry and Tracy are well known in the field for their humor, Tracy’s being more of a tongue-in-cheek variety, and Larry’s a mixture of teasing and warmth, showing an appreciation of human frailties (in thinking or character) but with sympathetic understanding, therefore never reaching the point of sarcasm.

At the NAGC convention in November 2013, a small group of colleagues (including the late Jim Gallagher, another giant in gifted education, who passed away only a half-year later in January 2014) came together to celebrate Larry’s life with his family. Larry’s wife Betty and their three beautiful daughters were present. I was able to learn more about Larry’s wonderful life from them. Larry passed away while hiking near his home in Knoxville, Tennessee (I still remember the vista of the Smoky Mountains from when I was there in 1998!), and I had a mysterious feeling that even that part was somehow meaningful to Larry’s life. It was an emotional moment for me as well as for my colleagues who were present with Larry’s family in the November of 2013. I wrote a little poem upon hearing about Larry’s unexpected passing and I shared it with Larry’s family and my colleagues on that occasion.

I have meant this book as an occasion on which to commemorate Larry, not knowing that it would take so long for me to write it up. But it is only fitting to dedicate this book to the memory of Larry on the tenth anniversary of his passing, with his lingering voice: be peaceful.