Outliers: The Story of Success
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Book reviews
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Wall Street Journal"Talent and hard work, yes, but plenty of other ingredients seem essential to achievement."
Reviews of Outliers were wide-ranging, positive to negative.
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Nature"Does genius breed success?" (Select PDF. Requires campus login.)
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New York TimesThumbs Up: "Malcolm Gladwell says success depends not only on brains and drive, but on where we come from — and what we do about it."
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New York TimesThumbs Down: "It’s true: Success succeeds, and advantages can help"
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The Guardian"Stating the obvious, but oh so cleverly: In investigating what sets geniuses apart, is Malcolm Gladwell also asking what makes him so special?"
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The New Republic"It is an axiom of Malcolm Gladwell's method that a perfect anecdote proves a fatuous rule."
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The NationLengthy overview on critical reception of Outliers, and other Gladwell works.
Pinker vs. Gladwell
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Stephen Pinker: NY Times book review"The reasoning in “Outliers,” which consists of cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies, had me gnawing on my Kindle."
Malcolm Gladwell and Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at Harvard University, published a series of critiques and rebuttals in 2009.
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Gladwell, Pinker letters to NY TimesGladwell: "I have not joined [Pinker] on the lonely ice floe of IQ fundamentalism."
Pinker: "What Malcolm Gladwell calls a “lonely ice floe” is what psychologists call “the mainstream.”" -
Malcolm Gladwell: Blog response, 12/3/2009"An ice floe is not necessarily a bad place to be. It’s just that if you are plainly floating on one, it doesn’t make much sense to insist that you are standing on solid ground."