On "Outliers"

        Hello hello, reader reader. I'll be blunt; I'm writing a book review. I felt that you needed a warning to avoid reading this post if you (like me) aren't particularly entertained by this sort of thing. I did enjoy reading the book, which is why I dredged myself out of my apathetic muck to write about it. I'm certainly not a paid faculty member of a major newspaper, and my only ethos is that of a cynical, bored, quasi-philosophical high-school student, but to me my opinions are completely valid, and if I like a book I can recommend it with conviction to anyone I damn well please. Enough fluff, I'll talk about the book now.

        As you may have guessed, the title of the book is "Outliers." It explores the factors that contribute to the success of individuals, and what distinguishes those who go on to become famous/rich and those who are bound to more subdued fates. Such a work can easily become unwieldy, branching off into heavily abstract discussions and contrived connections, but the author (Malcolm Gladwell) does a marvelous job of making the average reader understand what's going on. His language isn't always simplistic, but the premises for his arguments are; he doesn't generalize, but points out patterns and says "hey, isn't that odd? Doesn't it seem reasonable that this common factor might have something to do with it? After all, X has this relationship with Y, which is related to Z" etc. I personally like that he keeps no undue certainty when discussing success and the factors that contribute to it; after all, success is a very subjective concept, and one can't easily pin down its meaning. 

        One truth that a reader can derive from Outliers is that life is far from fair. Like chaotic systems, the evolution of a person within our society, though highly unpredictable, is heavily dependent on initial conditions. Here is a very poignant example: in the early part of the book, Gladwell examines the correlation between birth date of Canadian hockey players and their successes in the game later on in life. What he found (and the reader derived from data)  was that those born earlier in the year, due to the age requirements for different leagues and training, were much more likely to do well than those born later. Most can agree that how hard someone works should be more important than their birth date in determining success, but again and again we found that those born within certain time ranges were much more likely to succeed than their unlucky counterparts. I was very impressed, because I hadn't yet seen a book that could convey that.

        I suppose I could leave you with a definite recommendation to read or eschew (that's me being wordy, aren't I cool?) the book, but I figured that I could leave you with my model for answering this question when I try to decide for myself whether or not to read a book. Question 1: Does it sound interesting? Question 2: Do I have any desire to read this book? Question 3: Do I have the time to read this book? Question 4: How difficult would it be to obtain this book? You can assign your own weight to these questions, and in the end decide whether or not to read the book. In the end, if the result of the test is ~80%, I personally decide to go out and read the damn thing, but you're free to choose your own interest threshold, of course. Despite my bias, having already read the book, I read my book review and decided that I would want to read Outliers, in case you were wondering. Fine, fine; I understand that you don't want to (and thus won't) go through that process. So here it is: I recommend, nay, DEMAND that you read this book, it will change your life and make you lose 30 lbs. Perhaps the weight-loss part is made up, but it is certainly possible that reading Outliers could have a profound effect on your psyche or world-view. Congratulations if you managed to wade through this paragraph, and I wish I could offer more but I doubt I could reasonably add more to this post.