No one should mistake Malcolm Gladwell for a big thinker like, say, Stephen J.
But Gladwell's books are successful because he examines phenomena and topics of importance in an accessible and entertaining way. Critics will complain that his thesis is obvious (that opportunity, cultural inheritence and hard work play key roles in success), or that his examples are selective and ignore in turn outliers that don't illustrate his points - or, somewhat inconsistently, both. That Gladwell narrates the audio book himself adds greatly to the listening experience. Regardless of what you ultimately think of the author's analysis, Gladwell is a masterful storyteller, weaving together interesting anecdotes from such diverse sources as plane crash research to hillbilly feuds to standardized math tests. Gladwell's narration of his own work is generally skillful and an easy listen. Too often in this book, Gladwell seems to be profoundly stating the obvious. But I think the formula for producing an outlier is more complex than that. Gladwell's goal seems to be an attempt to take the shine off of society's great success stories by, in effect, claiming they just got lucky.
But is that really the case? Does anybody really think Bill Gates could have achieved what he did had he been born in Botswana, for example? What's more, while crediting these outside factors with making these "outliers" possible, he fails to note that in almost every case, hundreds if not thousands or even more other people had virtually identical birth situations, yet failed to achieve greatness. Gladwell repeatedly asserts that most people think Bill Gates-type successes are simply due to that person's raw talent and little else. They could not have done it alone." This is not exactly a particularly profound revelation. But at its core, the book's central theme is simply "successful people are aided in their success by their families, culture, education and other chance factors. Outliers has many interesting statistical anecdotes sprinkled throughout, to be sure.
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