Bookshelf: Outliers

I finished Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers a few days ago and it was really interesting. The book is all about how circumstances are essential to many tales of success, especially the American myth of the self-made man. Gladwell illustrates this from a series of angles - from the system of selecting elite hockey players in Canada to rice paddies in China and the Asian nomenclature for numbers to the real story of Bill Gates. However, like Gladwell's other books, partway through, while it was still very interesting, I started to feel like he'd made his points and was heading in another direction, as if he had two partial books, but neither was long enough to be published alone. Additionally, and I have to say this to prove the money I just spent on my masters was worth something, his methodology is not so strong. I'd love to see some more systematic analysis, especially of the birthdates data, and comparison groups. Oh, comparison groups! However, if he had taken that approach, it wouldn't be so readable and I probably wouldn't have read it myself. Anyway, it's great for a pop approach to the subject and I do recommend the book.

Very intriguing to think about the fact that Grace's potential academic success could be influenced significantly by where we live when she starts kindergarten. In Washington, the cut off date for kindergarten is August 31, and in California I think it's December 31. So, she'd be in the older half of the grade in Cali, but the among the youngest in Washington. This perhaps explains why Steve has beaten me at every game of intellectual prowess we've ever played - he was in the top three months of his grade, and I was in the youngest three months so I never reached my full potential. And I also couldn't play pro-hockey.