Talk About Books

Malcolm Gladwell writes about singularities. In his first book, Tipping Point, it's singular events; in his second book, Blink, it's singular moments, and in this book, Outliers: the Story of Success, it's about singular people. Gladwell looks for research which makes claims contrary to conventionally held beliefs. Then he offers up, startlingly, the flaws in the success stories we tell ourselves. “It is not the brightest who succeed,” Gladwell writes. “Nor is success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf. It is, rather, a gift. Outliers are those who have been given opportunities — and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.” He starts with a tale of individual greatness, about the Beatles or the titans of Silicon Valley or the enormously successful generation of New York Jews born in the early 20th century. Then he adds details that undercut those tales. So Bill Gates is introduced as a young computer pr...

Young Joe Piclett is struggling to fill the shoes of his mentor, legendary Vern Dunnegan, as game warden of Twelve Sleep County, Wyoming and trying to support his wife and growing family on the meager salary he makes. The hours are long, the work hard but satisfying.  Joe's honesty and integrity would pay off if he could avoid "bonehead moves" like ticketing the governor of the state for fishing without a license, for instance, or allowing a poacher to grab Joe's firearm from him. When that very same poacher turns up dead and bloodied in Joe's woodpile with only a cooler containing unidentified animal scat, his life, livelihood and family will never be the same. Upping the excitement are a couple of murders, local political and bureaucratic intrigue, a high-stakes pipeline scheme and an endangered species that Joe's eldest daughter discovers.  Without resorting to simplistic views, Box fuses ecological themes, vibrant descriptions of Wyoming...

Alan Clay is a consultant. He started off as a door-to-door salesman and worked his way up through Schwinn bikes, the Chicago manufacturer. In the traditional way of such characters, he's facing an existential-type crisis. He's divorced, he drinks too much, and the recession has worn down his earnings to practically nothing. He's "virtually broke, nearly unemployed", and he won't be able to pay his daughter's college fees unless he can pull off one more big job. Reliant, a huge conglomerate, has sent him to Jeddah to pitch for the IT infrastructure contract for King Abdullah Economic City ("KAEC"), a massive new development in the middle of nowhere. Alan and his colleagues hope to impress the king by showing him a cutting-edge holographic teleconferencing system, which can make a colleague in London appear in 3D in a tent in Saudi Arabia.  Alan and his team wait in the stiflingly hot "presentation tent" in the desert to p...

Nonfiction that reads like a thriller: On May 1, 1915, with WWI entering its tenth month, a luxury ocean liner as richly appointed as an English country house sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool, carrying a record number of children and infants. The passengers were surprisingly at ease, even though Germany had declared the seas around Britain to be a war zone. For months, German U-boats had brought terror to the North Atlantic. But the Lusitania was one of the era’s great transatlantic “Greyhounds”—the fastest liner then in service—and her captain, William Thomas Turner, placed tremendous faith in the gentlemanly strictures of warfare that for a century had kept civilian ships safe from attack. Germany, however, was determined to change the rules of the game, and Walther Schwieger, the captain of Unterseeboot-20 , was happy to oblige. Meanwhile, an ultra-secret British intelligence unit tracked Schwieger’s U-boat, but told no one. As U-20 and the Lusitania ...

New York Times Book Review, August 2016 praises The Underground Railroad: In his dynamic new novel, Colson Whitehead takes the Underground Railroad — the loosely interlocking network of black and white activists who helped slaves escape to freedom in the decades before the Civil War — and turns it from a metaphor into an actual train that ferries fugitives northward. The result is a potent, almost hallucinatory novel that leaves the reader with a devastating understanding of the terrible human costs of slavery. It possesses the chilling, matter-of-fact power of the slave narratives collected by the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s, with echoes of Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables” and Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” and with brush strokes borrowed from Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka and Jonathan Swift. “The Underground Railroad,” chronicles the life of a teenage slave named Cora, who flees the Georgia plantation where she was ...

Roger Angell may be best known for his books on baseball, but his talents transcend sports reportage. The author of favorites like The Summer Game and Season Ticket has produced a new collection of essays in which his skills as a memoirist are amply evident. Let Me Finish contains 17 pieces that cohere beautifully to form an overview of Angell's remarkable life, from his years at Harvard, to his service during the Second World War, to holidays spent with his mother, Katherine Angell, a longtime New Yorker editor, and his stepfather, beloved author E.B. White. Capturing the culture of 1930s New York, many of the essays evoke a time when movies cost a dime, manners mattered and divorces, like the bitter one that occurred between Angell's parents, were a source of scandal. The author's father, Ernest Angell, a brilliant and eccentric lawyer, personifies the period. Remembered fondly in the lively essay The King of the Forest, he presided over the fami...

Ann Patchett's latest novel follows six siblings over a period of 50 years. An embrace at a christening party between a man and woman married to other people leads to multiple divorces and remarriages. Patchett follows the two semi-connected families for the next 50 years, as the children become adults and the grown-ups become old. The nine chapters, which feel at times like short stories, proceed mostly chronologically, with regular flashbacks and occasional depictions of the same event from more than one person’s perspective. Insofar as there’s a main character, it’s Franny, who after babyhood becomes an avid reader, drops out of law school, dates a successful novelist and remains devoted to her family. Patchett's books are intelligent and engaging. In 2011 she started an independent bookstore in Nashville, becoming a heroine in the world of modern publishing.  She once wrote, “Writing is a job, a talent, but it’s also the place to go in your head. It is t...