Kim Peek, the savant who was the inspiration for Barry Levinson’s original screenplay and film, Rain Man, died last week at age fifty-eight.The New York Times obit limns the many extraordinary abilities and skills this man possessed.Of those, none is more head-snapping than the astonishing skill that allowed him to simultaneously read facing pages of a book— one with each eye. He ultimately read as many as 12,000 volumes. Even more remarkable, he could remember what he had read.This, despite the fact that, as the Times noted, Mr. Peek “was born with severe brain abnormalities that impaired his physical coordination...
