Sara Reviews: Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell!

You know when a dude on the bus or maybe a weird uncle starts talking to you and he's going on and on with very specific anecdotal stories and drawing tenuous conclusions from them and you're just like "calm down"? This book is kinda like that. It's called "Outliers," which implies that the author has some sort of grasp of statistics, but he then oxymoronically proceeds to generalize, oversimplify and draw sweeping conclusions from his hand-picked group of "outliers." There's no reason for the reader to believe that it's anything more than a collection of anecdotes. It's interesting, sure, but what's the point?

The first part of the book posits the wild idea that success is a a product of hard work, circumstance and being in the right place at the right time. You know, I had been wondering why my grandmother wasn't the creator of Microsoft, but this book really spells out why Bill Gates was in a slightly more advantageous position to found a pioneering, multi-billion dollar software corporation. I guess I should cut grandma some slack.

The rest of the book kind of devolves from there, with some interesting stories that lack the full picture to really convince you of the author's conclusions aside from the most generic and obvious ones. Cultural differences can affect communication styles? Really. I'm already bored of reviewing this.

I did learn a few things I guess so 3/10 stars!!!!!!!!!

Word count: ~75,000 was the closest I could find on the internet. Sounds about right.
Sara's point total: 75,000