Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
If you have read either of Gladwell's other books, The Tipping Point or Blink, then Outliers is immediately recognizable as his work. This time, he has written about what made the great individual successes of the world (like Bill Gates, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Bill Joy, etc.) so successful.
To no one's surprise, Gladwell proposes that there are hidden forces at work - that the difference between Gates and an equally talented person who has experience a great deal less success is......(drumroll)....luck. I have the same feelings about Outliers that I have about all of Gladwell's book. There is no doubt that he is an enchanting storyteller and that regularly offers startling revelations that change the way the reader perceives a particular event. But in Outliers, he tends to alternate between insightful perspectives and points that elicit remarks like "thank you, captain obvious!" from my inner monologue as I read. Did I really need a several hundred page book to tell me that what sets the biggest successes apart from the lesser successes are fortuitous circumstances and other things outside of our control (like family background, etc.)? After all, I have been told throughout my life that success is attained by preparing myself so that when I encounter a lucky break, I can take advantage of it. Nevertheless, the anecdotes Gladwell tells do make the read worthwhile. Each provides a unique take on the person or group being discussed. They also get me to look at other situations differently, too - to look for the lucky breaks that result in success. But that is the level on which the book works for me - as a series of interesting insights on independent subjects. And when Gladwell tries to pull his findings together into unifying theories on success, I'm sorry but I just don't buy it. Each individual story is too different, based largely on the fact that success is defined differently for different chapters. He explains why so many more hockey players are born in Jan/Feb/Mar than the end of the year in one chapter and explains Bill Gates' success in another. Both were due to hidden luck (the cutoff date for junior hockey leagues and Bill having access to computers at an early age). But he does not explain what made Wayne Gretzky or Mario Lemieux rise to the apex of the NHL, a much more parallel story to Gates. He has far too much room to pick and choose the stories that back up his thesis and only present those without presenting the ones that don't. In many ways it seems like he knew the conclusion and then went searching for stories that backed it up, rather than starting by looking for common threads and then drawing a conclusion.
Outliers doesn't do what Freakonomics, another similar book does. It doesn't want to accept that the stories of hidden forces are interesting, yet mostly unrelated, and that there is no huge, overarching lesson to be learned, other than the fact that these hidden forces do exist.
Before my freshman year of college, my summer reading assignment was Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. Although many of my classmates blew it off, I didn't and I learned a valuable lesson, not from the book itself, but from the way that we analyzed it. Until that time, I generally felt that if I was assigned a book as part of schoolwork (especially a non-fiction book), I needed to accept the information in that book as FACT. But in the roundtable discussion, much to my surprise people began to challenge the author's theories, which gave me a whole new perspective on non-fiction writing. I learned to process the theories presented to me objectively and to decide for myself whether or not I agreed. No author's books have challenged me more in this way than Gladwell's. So that even if I don't buy everything that he says, his books still challenge me to think, which is a fantastic thing.
For this reason, I will continue reading his books even if they frustrate me from time to time as Outliers did. Despite my criticisms I would highly recommend Outliers and maintain that there is no author with whom I would rather have a discussion (or debate) about his work than Mr. Gladwell.
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
To put it simply, Into Thin Air is one of the best non-fiction books I have ever read. How many times have tragic, yet infinitely fascinating events occurred about which we will never know exactly what happened. Think Amelia Earhart, D.B. Cooper (look it up), Natalee Holloway or the subject of another Krakauer book (Into the Wild), Christopher McCandless. Now imagine that, for any of those famous mysteries, there was a journalist present and that he survived to write about exactly what happened. This is what happened in 1996 on Mount Everest. As tens of climbers made an assault on the peak, an unexpected storm assaulted the mountain, taking with it the lives 8 mountaineers including two very experienced and highly skilled climbers. Several others survived by only the slimmest of margins including Krakauer, a contributor to Outdoors magazine, who had been sent to the mountain to write about climbing it. The magazine got much more than it bargained for when Krakauer found himself in the middle of one of the most riveting stories of adventure, survival and the limits of humans that I have ever encountered. I hung on his every word and found myself constantly trying to put myself in his shoes. He made me feel the isolation that he felt when the surviving climbers were trapped in the storm with only their tiny tents to protect them from -100 degree wind chills at about 26,000 feet. Even though the authorities knew where they were trapped, no one would be able to save them because of the weather and the altitude but themselves.
But even before the story turned tragic, it was still enthralling. Krakauer took me to a world so exotic and different from my own that it's hard to believe they exist in the same world. He made me want to get off my ass and see some places. Luckily, I will have the opportunity to do so in the fall and I can't wait.
The ultimate question that I took from the book is this: Is it actually a tragedy when people die while willingly participating in an activity that they have accepted has a high risk of death? Perhaps not, but it is interesting to see the humanity come out of these seemingly superhuman individuals when death stares them in the face. But why would people willingly climb mountains like Everest, K2 and Annapurna, the last of which has a mortality rate of 40%!! Before reading Into Thin Air I couldn't begin to comprehend why. But after reading the book, I think I understand. And suddenly I feel a desire to try to climb Everest myself. Hopefully it will pass before I do something stupid.
Before my freshman year of college, my summer reading assignment was Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. Although many of my classmates blew it off, I didn't and I learned a valuable lesson, not from the book itself, but from the way that we analyzed it. Until that time, I generally felt that if I was assigned a book as part of schoolwork (especially a non-fiction book), I needed to accept the information in that book as FACT. But in the roundtable discussion, much to my surprise people began to challenge the author's theories, which gave me a whole new perspective on non-fiction writing. I learned to process the theories presented to me objectively and to decide for myself whether or not I agreed. No author's books have challenged me more in this way than Gladwell's. So that even if I don't buy everything that he says, his books still challenge me to think, which is a fantastic thing.
For this reason, I will continue reading his books even if they frustrate me from time to time as Outliers did. Despite my criticisms I would highly recommend Outliers and maintain that there is no author with whom I would rather have a discussion (or debate) about his work than Mr. Gladwell.
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
To put it simply, Into Thin Air is one of the best non-fiction books I have ever read. How many times have tragic, yet infinitely fascinating events occurred about which we will never know exactly what happened. Think Amelia Earhart, D.B. Cooper (look it up), Natalee Holloway or the subject of another Krakauer book (Into the Wild), Christopher McCandless. Now imagine that, for any of those famous mysteries, there was a journalist present and that he survived to write about exactly what happened. This is what happened in 1996 on Mount Everest. As tens of climbers made an assault on the peak, an unexpected storm assaulted the mountain, taking with it the lives 8 mountaineers including two very experienced and highly skilled climbers. Several others survived by only the slimmest of margins including Krakauer, a contributor to Outdoors magazine, who had been sent to the mountain to write about climbing it. The magazine got much more than it bargained for when Krakauer found himself in the middle of one of the most riveting stories of adventure, survival and the limits of humans that I have ever encountered. I hung on his every word and found myself constantly trying to put myself in his shoes. He made me feel the isolation that he felt when the surviving climbers were trapped in the storm with only their tiny tents to protect them from -100 degree wind chills at about 26,000 feet. Even though the authorities knew where they were trapped, no one would be able to save them because of the weather and the altitude but themselves.
But even before the story turned tragic, it was still enthralling. Krakauer took me to a world so exotic and different from my own that it's hard to believe they exist in the same world. He made me want to get off my ass and see some places. Luckily, I will have the opportunity to do so in the fall and I can't wait.
The ultimate question that I took from the book is this: Is it actually a tragedy when people die while willingly participating in an activity that they have accepted has a high risk of death? Perhaps not, but it is interesting to see the humanity come out of these seemingly superhuman individuals when death stares them in the face. But why would people willingly climb mountains like Everest, K2 and Annapurna, the last of which has a mortality rate of 40%!! Before reading Into Thin Air I couldn't begin to comprehend why. But after reading the book, I think I understand. And suddenly I feel a desire to try to climb Everest myself. Hopefully it will pass before I do something stupid.
