If you like The Tipping Point, try
Posts Tagged ‘malcolm gladwell’
Loved ‘The Tipping Point’? Try these!
Friday, July 1st, 2011Bookbits for June 12th, 2009
Friday, June 12th, 2009-
The best bookstore in the world – that would be us! No, the news that we were voted exactly that by the Irish Independent this week will never get old.
- Lists! Lots of summer reading lists coming your way: here’s the Wall Street Journal with a flashy bunch of them. Here are the picks by a NY Times contributor, a bookstore manager, and an editor. The LA Times will not be outdone, and has 60 books for you to read.
- The science fiction of today is the US defense policy of tomorrow. Reminds me of all those Star Trek gadgets (from the early series) that are now reality. Pretty cool!
- Awards! The Red House Children’s Book Awards (voted for by young readers themselves) were handed out: overall winner is Sophie McKenzie for Blood Ties, and fellow category winners are The Pencil by Allan Ahlberg and Bruce Ingman and Daisy and the Trouble with Zoos by Kes Gray.
- Self-professed Agatha Christie arch-fan John Curran has discovered two new short stories by her. They will be published in his debut called Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making.
- While I’m talking of lost literature: an unpublished children’s poem by Ted Hughes has been found.
The governor of California wants to abolish school textbooks in favor of ebooks. *Insert appropriate Arnie quote here.* Interestingly, stock immediately fell for Pearson, educational publishers.
- My colleagues and I get very frustrated by the turf wars going on between US and UK publishers about who gets to publish what book in which corner of the world (very 1490s, that), but try being visually impaired and then wanting to read or listen to a book…
- Interview! Here’s an interview with/article about Malcolm Gladwell.
- Hayley already mentioned the soon-to-be-millionth word to enter the OED, and I now get to tell you what it is: “Web 2.0″. Is that even a word? What a pity “n00b” and “jai ho” just missed out!
Author Events in January
Friday, January 2nd, 2009Happy New Year everyone!
Wow, you don’t log in for a week, and what do you come back to? Over 1500 (one thousand five hundred) spam comments. Not cool. I’ve managed to get it down to just over 500 still to be “processed”, but my eyes were blurring so I figured I should do something a little more constructive. Like telling you which authors will be visiting our country in the very near future:
First up is John Sinclair, American poet, one-time leader of the White Panthers, and the subject of John Lennon’s song John Sinclair. On January 5th there will be a screening of 20 to Life: The Life and Times of John Sinclair at De Nieuwe Anita in Amsterdam at 20.30 hrs (if I read it all correctly). Mr. Sinclair will be there to introduce the film.
Also this month, Mr. Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers, will be touching down in the country. You can find him at the University of Amsterdam on January 30th, at 20.00 hrs. Be sure to check out the John Adams website for all the details.
Well, that’s the first post of 2009 over and done with. 
I hope you can make it to either of the events! I, sadly, will be junking spam comments the rest of the month.
You Review: Outliers by Malcom Gladwell
Thursday, November 13th, 2008Reviewed by Steph Mandell
In Outliers, Malcom Gladwell’s third book (after The Tipping Point and Blink), there are stories of successful people. But these are the back stories of success, an analysis of all the other things that lined up to allow successful people the chance to work their way to the top.
The book is split in two halves, Opportunity and Legacy. Opportunity breaks down the lucky chances people got, and how they came up later to give the successful person an edge they didn’t even know they had. “Extraordinary achievement is less about talent than it is about opportunity”. One of the first stories, about Canadian ice hockey players, outlines how the luck of being born closest to the deadline for age-class hockey gives the oldest, and thus largest players an advantage. When the all-star teams are chosen, the size difference between a 10 year-old born in January versus one born in November is noticeable, and the older boy gets chosen. This leads to more coaching, more practice, more matches, and so a year later, the skill difference between those chosen to play more is appreciable. As the years go on, the difference widens, and by the time they’re at the end of their teens, you get hockey teams made up of large percentages of players born in the first three months of the year. Each story in the book is backed up with some academic studies.
If you’ve ever tried to learn something, you know that the more you do it, the better you get at it. So then the stories move on to the opportunity of lots of practice. These two building blocks, the initial bits of luck (a birthday, access to a computer, other seemingly inconsequential facts) and the amount of time the successful person spends pursuing their goal, come back in many of the stories.
The Legacy half of the book take a look at heritage and the role it, too, plays in how people communicate and what their expectations are, leading to how well they succeed. The way your parents and grandparents did something shapes the way you’ll do it too.
Because the stories are so clear, it gets your mental juices flowing. I started thinking about my own personal success, goals I have and how the luck, hard work and advantages I have can play into that next thing I’m going to do. This book is a patient guide through ideas which I could use to increase the success in my own life.
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