In Which I Finally Find Some Time
Technically, dear reader, my resolution was to read a book every week. Posting a review here on my LiveJournal was only to serve as a prod to keep me from falling off the wagon. So technically, with Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers having been completed last Sunday, and my new handbook on weightlifting close to being done, I'm still on track even though I'm just getting to the Gladwell review today. Holiday festivities really took a lot of time these past few days. We had our fourteenth (!) annual Grinch Party last Saturday - a great success if I do say so myself. We welcomed a wide range of guests, from family to coworkers to our longtime friends, many of whom are here on LJ. It was great to see those who came, and we hope that if you missed it this year, you'll be able to make it next year!
Well, that accounts for Saturday, you may say, but what about the rest of the week, huh? Well, Sunday was spent cleaning up and recovering, Monday was the football team's awards banquet, Thursday was the office holiday party, I had grading to plow through before the kiddies went off on Christmas Break... you get the picture.
But here I am, better late than never, to recommend Gladwell's Outliers to you. If you've read anything by Malcolm Gladwell, you know that his specialty is to take episodes reflecting commonly held assumptions up to the light and turn them at just a different-enough angle to challenge the things we thought we knew. You may not agree with everything he says, but you'll close the back cover of one of his books having gained a new perspective on something you took for granted. Outliers definitely follows this model. In it, Gladwell takes on our assumptions about success and talent, which our society has always tended to ascribe to individual qualities. Now, I should hasten to say at the start that Gladwell isn't suggesting that individual talent plays no role in success. Rather, he fills in the rest of the picture, illustrating how chance, luck, social structures, cultural inheritance, a whole raft of factors, combine to provide opportunities to some and to deny them to others. Now, having been given opportunity, individual skill, drive, and talent determines how far one takes them. But he reminds us that many equally skilled, driven, and hard-working people never get the opportunities to use their individual gifts to flourish. Looking at everything from Canadian hockey players to South Korean pilots, from feuding Appalachian clans to German musical prodigies, he shows how circumstance can work to give some people opportunities, and deny it to others.
I finished the book more sympathetic to those who struggle, and feeling less smug about my own success. It's an effect worth having, and I'm hopeful that the many folks who purchased and read Outliers enjoyed similar insights.
Now to pack for my visit to family for the holidays! That means the review of my weightlifting handbook will probably be late, too... But I'll be sticking to a book a week, I promise!