50books_poc | Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell

I didn't check, but I imagine this has been reviewed here before ...

I've been a Gladwell fan for a long time, and I think this is his best book. He has found a new way of framing (among other things) class discrimination, a way that stands some chance of making headway with the "we all start equal" crowd.

His basic thesis is that the people who look like stars in any field, from hockey to computer science to the law invariably turn out to be part of cohorts that had unexamined special advantages: these might be sociocultural, or they might be pure coincidence (sports success, he proves, correlates astonishingly well to birth month). He also examines situations where a set of unexamined special circumstances can be disadvantages (cultural issues that limit pilot safety, for example, or that increase honor killing).

Being Gladwell, he is scrupulously careful to point out that cultural differences are, in fact, differences, and confer advantages and disadvantages based on situation and context. He also does the brave thing of using his own life story in the book's last chapter, showing how the points he made throughout the book made it possible for him to be a middle-class Caribbean-Canadian man with a very successful writing career (and it made me want to find and read his mother's books).

Highly recommended.