Malcom Gladwell- Outliers, the Story of Success Review

Malcom Gladwell is no social scientist. He is an enormously curious journalist with an attractive talent of writing bestsellers. His lucid essays in Outliers are written in a fashion that will keep you hooked. Outliers is a page turner. It is for the common folk who look for reasons behind why things didnt happen for some and why it happened for others. Ever wondered why Asians are good at maths? Or what is common between Bill Joy and Bill Gates . The book makes geniuses seem more as a product of their own background and history than what they are usually made out to be.  The ordinary man is made to seem much more special than he probably is. It is probably this attitude of appeasing to the public and reducing the enigma of  the successful that turned his book into a bestseller. But the pitfall of such a strategy is that you get bashed up by the learned ones. Steven Pinker criticizes the work as " cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies"




"The common thread in Gladwell’s writing is a kind of populism, which seeks to undermine the ideals of talent, intelligence and analytical prowess in favor of luck, opportunity, experience and intuition. For an apolitical writer like Gladwell, this has the advantage of appealing both to the Horatio Alger right and to the egalitarian left." writes Pinker. This exactly is what makes his writing so popular.


But despite all this I will say that this book is still worth a read as the anecdotes and the interesting conclusions that Mr. Gladwell draws will surely make you stop and think.

Steven Pinker Quotes borrowed from :
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/review/Pinker-t.html?pagewanted=1



I also found out that some of his critics have even made a website, which generates comic titles for his "future-bestsellers". Here is the link -
http://www.malcolmgladwellbookgenerator.com/

Some of them go like this :
SLURP  What Kittens tongues teach about Derivatives!
WINK The power of Thinking while simultaneously flirting!

Malcom Gladwell