From what I can find online, that book fires my snakeoil detectors. I'd be wanting citations to peer-reviewed papers for every claim about everything says makes a difference, and then I'd be looking up the papers myself to see whether they really said that. Unless the claims were things I wanted to be true, of course ;-) For example:
He maintains that we are all born with genes to learn (I guess some have genes that give them the potential to have very high IQs or low IQs.) The right environment, diet, and stimulation causes those genes to be "turned on" (or keeps "bad" genes from getting turned on, at least.)
My understanding, though it could be out of date or wrong, is that at this point, despite people having looked, we have practically nothing in the way of convincing connections between specific gene variants and IQ. Therefore I doubt that it can be known that particular environmental factors turn on or off particular relevant genes - we don't even know which genes that is! Without concrete evidence to the contrary, therefore, I'd write this off as pseudo-science: he's saying something that he guesses to be true and it sounds good, but he can't know.
Whether, and if so to what extent, IQ can be improved by environment is a highly controversial topic. The best book I've read on this is Flynn's
What is intelligence? but even this does not really answer the question.
In the end, the right answer is probably "who cares?". Many (all?) aspects of achievement *can* be improved by working at them, and the ability to work constructively can also be improved by practice. And for 0-3yos, the appropriate work of both kinds is play....
And yes, we've discussed this before at length (at least once that I remember), but I have a feeling it was in a thread whose title didn't match the contents very well, and am failing to find it.
