About a week and a half ago one of my friends loaned me a book and said it was a must read. I am a little skeptical of taking his advice and his literature at this point because I've been burned by past experiences. For example, A Clockwork Orange and Nine 1/2 Weeks both his suggestions and both SUCKED! I had watched the suggested movies before I started the book and I told him that he better hope the book was the redeemer of the sh!t movies he gave me.
Well people, I am pleased to announce the book was awesome, for non-fiction. As I have said before I am not a big reader of non-fiction, this is the ONLY the 3rd non-fiction book that I have read and I am so glad I liked it. The overall concept is awesome and what keeps your interest is that it is consistently changing stories but staying on track at the same time. You don't have the worn out 300 pages of the same war over and over. It is super interesting and I am highly recommending it to anyone who hasn't read it. It makes me wonder what I was born into, what opportunities I have missed just by circumstance, and also what my life will turn out like in the end due to the opportunities that I have taken. Outliers also makes me want to give my kids every opportunity there is and really have them stick with it because it seems that it's all about being in the right place at the right time.
So if you haven't read Outliers then go out and get it. My copy was a borrowed copy but you better believe that when I get home I will be buying a used copy for my bookshelf or it would make a great Christmas gift. ;) I could get it on my Kindle but it's so good and sort of philosophical I think I would like this in actual old fashion paper. Hehe
The Author- Malcom Gladwell
SignatureReviewed by Leslie ChangIn Outliers, Gladwell (The Tipping Point) once again proves masterful in a genre he essentially pioneered—the book that illuminates secret patterns behind everyday phenomena. His gift for spotting an intriguing mystery, luring the reader in, then gradually revealing his lessons in lucid prose, is on vivid display. Outliers begins with a provocative look at why certain five-year-old boys enjoy an advantage in ice hockey, and how these advantages accumulate over time. We learn what Bill Gates, the Beatles and Mozart had in common: along with talent and ambition, each enjoyed an unusual opportunity to intensively cultivate a skill that allowed them to rise above their peers. A detailed investigation of the unique culture and skills of Eastern European Jewish immigrants persuasively explains their rise in 20th-century New York, first in the garment trade and then in the legal profession. Through case studies ranging from Canadian junior hockey champions to the robber barons of the Gilded Age, from Asian math whizzes to software entrepreneurs to the rise of his own family in Jamaica, Gladwell tears down the myth of individual merit to explore how culture, circumstance, timing, birth and luck account for success—and how historical legacies can hold others back despite ample individual gifts. Even as we know how many of these stories end, Gladwell restores the suspense and serendipity to these narratives that make them fresh and surprising.One hazard of this genre is glibness. In seeking to understand why Asian children score higher on math tests, Gladwell explores the persistence and painstaking labor required to cultivate rice as it has been done in East Asia for thousands of years; though fascinating in its details, the study does not prove that a rice-growing heritage explains math prowess, as Gladwell asserts. Another pitfall is the urge to state the obvious: No one, Gladwell concludes in a chapter comparing a high-IQ failure named Chris Langan with the brilliantly successful J. Robert Oppenheimer, not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires and not even geniuses—ever makes it alone. But who in this day and age believes that a high intelligence quotient in itself promises success? In structuring his book against that assumption, Gladwell has set up a decidedly flimsy straw man. In the end it is the seemingly airtight nature of Gladwell's arguments that works against him. His conclusions are built almost exclusively on the findings of others—sociologists, psychologists, economists, historians—yet he rarely delves into the methodology behind those studies. And he is free to cherry-pick those cases that best illustrate his points; one is always left wondering about the data he evaluated and rejected because it did not support his argument, or perhaps contradicted it altogether. Real life is seldom as neat as it appears in a Malcolm Gladwell book.
No comments:
Post a Comment