My book of the Month to read was Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell:
General Thoughts:
I went into this book pretty excited because I have herd a lot of “hype” and good things about it. For the most part it did not disappoint. Gladwell has filled the book with tons of interesting insites. My favorite portion of the book was the chapter on professional ice hockey. I think this struck me as the most interesting chapter simply because of my love of Hockey. It was very eye-opening to see that such an arbitrary thing like your date of birth could have such a profound effect on your likelihood of playing hockey in the NHL.
There were portions of the book where I thought Gladwell stretched or was reaching a bit. Specifically in the portion he wrote about intelligence. However he does very well to back most things in the book up with concrete examples, and research. The most interesting part in the entire book for me was the discussion of underprivileged kids school performance. Specifically that they statistically actually “out performed” rich kids if you looked at just the school year, then when rich kids spent their summers doing as Gladwell so aptly phrased it “rich kid things” like summer camps and continuing their education, they started to leave the poor kids behind. Additionally the fact that we even have such a long summer break for kids, and how that is directly tied to our cultures way of farming I found very fascinating. I really love learning about things like that. Once Gladwell presented the question I realized I had no idea why we took the whole summer off from school growing up. I remember loving it at the time. Seeing how this formed over 100 years ago so that kids could help farming activities makes total since, and also his proposal of removing this antiquated summer vacation to allow for underprivileged kids to keep pace with “rich kids” made perfect sense to me. It is really interesting that something as simple as basing our school schedule off of how our ancestors farmed over 100 years ago could be the leading cause in education and income inequalities in this country (assuming you subscribe to the notion that the more education someone has, the more income they will earn over their lifetime).
Would I recommend it:
Definite Yes in the recommendation column.