Outliers: A Story of Success

This week's reading was from my independent reading book. It is called Outliers: The Story of Success,  by Malcolm Gladwell. The section I read had explored a strange statistical occurrence that show in the birth date of talented hockey players are prominently in January and February. He also looked at other "outliers", extraordinary success stories, such as computer scientists and a small town in America that never gets heart disease, to examine the origin of success. Malcolm Gladwell is a British Canadian journalist and speaker who constantly deals with issues in social science. His purpose in writing Outliers is clear from the beginning: to criticize the world's definition of success and change the way in which we allow unfair advantages to occur. He believes that the way in which our society works is that we write off people as failures too quickly, and stunts their development and potential for the extraordinary. He writes for those who want to study social sciences, societal behaviors, and social psychology. Malcolm Gladwell effectively achieves his purpose by using logos, and argues that if we want more extraordinary people in the world, we would have to change the fundamental system in which we breed success. This is an effective strategy because it is straight foward and easy to follow. He makes his argument very reader friendly and does not overwhelm with complicated statistics. He makes the narrative true to character and it is a proper tone.