Outliers Book Review - Stories of Success

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IP is over the quota

Malcolm Gladwell's ability to take the somewhat obscure patterns of everyday life and bring attention to them in easy to understand language is his true strength as a writer and really as a researcher.

The book Tipping Point (Time Warner Book Group, 2000, 2002), Gladwell explains how ideas, trends or social activities become phenomena's with just an unseen force that he called the tipping point. In Blink (Time Warner Book Group, 2005), he explores how and why decisions are made in the blink of an eye.

With his new book, Outliers The Story of Success (Little Brown and Company, 2008), Gladwell has developed a theory for why some people are more successful than others. In his research, he found patterns of family history, birthdates, birthplace, and culture contribute to a person's success.

While in his first two books he took relatively simple concepts and gave them shape, form and force, in Outliers, the book starts out very strong but in the end not all of the research seems to support his theories.

Social Class Makes a Difference in Success

The name of the book is defined in the very first paragraph. Gladwell wrote that an outlier is,"1: something that is situated away from or classified differently from a main or related body 2: a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from others in the sample".

He uses the remainder of the book to detail how patterns can be found when comparing individuals in certain groups. Some of the patterns included:

Most successful hockey players are born in the month of January.

After researching athletes, musicians and others, research shows it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert.

Successful technology giants like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Paul Allen, were born between the years of 1953 and 1955.

The "honor culture" experienced throughout the southern states, especially in the Appalachians, was born out of the 'Scotch-Irish' decedents who settled in those areas.

Children who were raised in upper and upper middle classes were more successful in their adult lives than those raised in lower and lower middle class families because of a sense of entitlement.

The Chinese culture can understand math faster and better than other cultures because of working long hours 360 days a year with rice paddies. And, Chinese children learn to count earlier in life because Chinese number words are shorter and easier to repeat than English number words.

A Pattern of Success for Gladwell

While the premise of this book is not as substantiated by the research (I'm still not sure how rice paddies relate to being better at math) as Gladwell's previous books, some of the research such as the 10,000 to master a skill makes perfect sense.

Gladwell's storytelling is what makes Outliers worth the read.

Writing reviews about high-technology industry Marco Gustafsson covers topics about digital libraries, electronic books, e-inks, etc. Visit Digital Book Readers and find out more about mobile reading movement.

Understanding Flight

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AppId is over the quota

Summary

Aimed at an adult audience, Understanding Flight is an ambitious book. It aims to explain complex aerodynamic principles and technologies that make airplanes possible by using simple diagrams in about 300 pages.

The Good

The technical facts in the book were very well researched. I have to say, I was impressed. Some of the concepts covered are very hard to understand, much less explain clearly in a non-technical fashion. There are lots of technical explanations in the book, and they are all competently written.

Most pages have inset boxes with interesting bits of aviation trivia. A lot of the trivia was new to me, which was a surprise. That's hard to do with an aviation buff like me.

The Bad

The writing and editing is competent but not the best. I caught an occasional typo. Some of the sentences were poorly worded. There were a couple of sentences that I reread several times because I couldn't understand what the author was trying to tell me. In the end I always had to give up.

Some might argue that this is the type of material that one can find for free on Wikipedia. That may be true for a lot of it, but the quality of the illustrations, the consistency in the writing style, and the convenience of a well-organized printed book are hard to beat.

I found the lack of a bibliography a bit bizarre. Given that this is an introductory book to a complex subject, it is very natural to feel a need to look for more in-depth information elsewhere.

The Ugly

The book is humorless. The writing style is somewhat conversational, but it is pretty dry. The boxes with the trivia struck me as an attempt to lighten up the book. Unfortunately, for me the trivia was just a distraction. It rarely had anything to do with the text surrounding it. Rather than enhance the text, most of the time the trivia just made me lose my train of thought.

The author did a great job of researching his facts, but sometimes he fails to connect the dots. For example, he first explains that the larger the diameter of a propeller, the more efficient it can be at producing a given amount of thrust. Then he goes on to talk about multibladed propellers. When he explains why they are less efficient than two-bladed propellers, he fails to make what I thought was an obvious connection. With more blades, the diameter of the propeller has to be less, which leads to lower overall propeller efficiency. I agree with the explanation that he provided, but it struck me as incomplete.

Conclusion

This is a good book. Very well researched, the facts about airplanes are presented clearly. There is lots and lots of good information here. I actually learned a thing or two about airplanes from reading this book. Given how much time I have spent doing my own research, that is hard to do.

I own the second edition of the book. From the description of the changes since the first edition in the book's introduction, it seems to me that grabbing a used copy of the first edition would be a good bargain purchase. In other words, most people would be perfectly happy with the first edition. There are many copies of this earlier edition available for $5 or less. They would make an excellent buy.

http://www.rcadvisor.com/ founder - Home of the best model airplane calculator. Free!

Author of RCadvisor's Model Airplane Design Made Easy and other books.

Host of Ask the RCadvisor in the free weekly http://www.thecrashcast.com/ podcasts.

AMA Scientific Leader and Contest Director #4601.

Book Review: A Broken Childhood: A True Story of Abuse

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IP is over the quota

Non-fiction/Memoir
A Broken Childhood: A True Story of Abuse
Lydia Ola Taiwo
2011
Book Guild Publishing
Pages: 94

A Broken Childhood: A True Story of Abuse is author Lydia Ola Taiwo's account of the physical, mental, and emotional abuse she suffered at the hands of her parents from five to twelve-years-old. As a young girl, Lydia is loved and cared for by other caregivers during her childhood, but the abuse by her parents, mainly her mother, overshadows most of what was positive in the girl's life. Like many survivors of abuse, Lydia still struggles to understand the reasons why her parents hurt her.

Born in Camberwell, London to parents of Nigerian descent, Lydia was sent to live in a foster home as an infant. This was a common practice among the Nigerian community at the time, allowing young parents to work and attend school without having to provide and pay for childcare. Lydia discovered later in her childhood that she has a younger sister who was also placed in a foster care home.

At the age of five, Lydia's parents abruptly removed her from her loving foster home to live with them in a small, one-room apartment where she slept on the couch. The abuse began immediately. Lydia was left alone in the apartment often and when her parents were home very little was said to her that did not involve a command or a verbal lashing. The author writes extensively about the chores she was required to complete from a very young age including caring for her younger sister and brother, household chores, and meal preparation. Lydia is explicit in her descriptions of the injuries she acquired as a result of the physical abuse she endured: major head injuries, broken teeth, and scars all over her body from being lashed with an electrical cable that are still visible today.

Lydia's accounts of her childhood are horrific and inspire anger in the reader. Even though the author expresses her on rage towards her parents, she also writes about the long journey to forgiveness: "There was a struggle going on inside me for many years, a struggle of revenge and hatred towards my mother and father-but one day I took a decision to forgive them for all they had done to me (88)." It is with a tone imbued with forgiveness that Lydia has written this book. The author's story is an example of how a person who has been harmed can make a decision to release the anger so that her life can be defined by more than the abuse she survived.

A Broken Childhood is a tale of bravery by a survivor of child abuse that will speak to victims, caregivers, and child advocates alike. It is also a story of self preservation and forgiveness that any reader will be able to relate to.

Melissa Brown Levine for Independent Professional Book Reviewers
http://www.bookreviewers.org/
http://www.melissabrownlevine.com/