Interview With International Bestseller Malcolm Gladwell

Culture is as crucial for success as intelligence, Malcolm Gladwell told Deutsche Welle in an interview. He also explains why he owns a Ronald Reagan poster and why he might add a chapter on Barack Obama to his new book.

Malcolm Gladwell is the author of the international bestseller Outliers: The Story of Successand a staff writer with The New Yorker magazine. His earlier books The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference(2000) and Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking(2005) both reached No. 1 on the New York Times bestsellers list. Previously Gladwell was a reporter and New York bureau chief with the Washington Post. In 2005 he was named one of 100 Most Influential People by Time Magazine.

DW-WORLD: In your new book, you argue that the success of extraordinary people -- so-called outliers -- depends at least as much on outside factors such as culture, family and the time in which people grow up, as on intrinsic factors such as talent or intelligence. A lot of people would say, sure that's true and obvious. Why did you still feel it was important to make that argument?

Malcolm Gladwell: Because although we kind of know that we don't often act on it. We still like to pretend we have these perfect meritocracies in place. When it comes to giving out positions in elite educational institutions, or when it comes to constructing how we choose football players we always behave as if there is a perfect meritocracy and then we are surprised when, lo and behold, there isn't. But then we don't act on it. When we discover those flaws, it's not like we change the rules. We continue to persist in this mythology. So we would all say, yes it must be true that generation makes a difference in the kinds of opportunities that are accorded to you. But do we know that 1955 is a hugely significant year if you're going to be a computer programmer. It's enormously useful to kind of take a vague intuition and zero in and specify what role it's playing.

On the other hand, you make statements like "it's not the brightest who succeed." Sure, not every brainy person will automatically be a high achiever, but it certainly doesn't hurt and a lot of them will be outliers. Isn't that statement a bit extreme?

Remember, in the chapter on intelligence I make it very clear that intelligence matters, but it only matters up to a point. So I do establish this kind of threshold for it. I am not saying that your IQ is irrelevant if you want to be a Nobel Prize winner. On the contrary, it's very relevant. The point is it ceases to be relevant past the point of 120. At no point am I dismissing the role of that kind of ability. I am not saying that the Beatles are tone deaf. They're not tone deaf, they have an aptitude for music, it's just, as an explanation for their success, it's wholly inadequate. It requires us to go back and look at other factors.

Read more of the interview with Malcolm Gladwell here, or get a copy of his book now!

The Challenges to American Power and President Obama: New Book Discusses Problems

The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power

The notion that a change of US president can, by itself, sweep up the foreign policy detritus of the Bush years is ludicrous. Barack Obama may believe he can undo its worst excesses, but he's got to play the cards he has been dealt, and as David Sanger points out, his room for maneuver will be a lot tighter than he might expect.

What, for example, would all those Obama supporters waving their placards calling for change really expect him to do vis-à-vis Iran? Only the politically naïve, says Sanger, "think the Iranians will give up their nuclear program without the lingering concern that bombers may appear over the skies". Far more likely, he says, is a future in which crises are too plentiful and expectations too high for Obama to steer a truly new course, no matter what his more excitable lieutenants think.

American presidents tend to enter office with an exaggerated sense of their own destiny which often ensnarls them in troubling moral and strategic complications. Abraham Lincoln was a rare exception. "I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me," he wrote to a friend in 1864. Obama would do well to heed such caution.

A similar disconnect between claims and reality, Sanger argues, characterizes almost every diplomatic or military venture the Bush administration has undertaken. In Afghanistan, we meet General Dan McNeill. A chart in his office illustrates "what America's allies were unwilling to do – go out on patrol far from camp, or travel beyond their assigned sector, even if fellow Nato troops were in trouble in a firefight".

Read more about Obama's challenges, or get a copy now!

Abraham Lincoln: New Book Documents Legacy and History

Abraham Lincoln

Feb. 12 marks the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth, and you could fill many a stovepipe hat with the bevy of books recently released in honor of that occasion. Among them is a slim little volume, titled simply Abraham Lincolnand penned by one of the country's best Civil War historians, James McPherson, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for his work Battle Cry of Freedom.

In just 65 pages of text, McPherson presents a compelling, straightforward biography of our country's 16th president, beginning with his legendary birth in a log cabin in Kentucky. There is an art to "writing short" - it requires knowing a great deal about a topic and then being able to precisely carve out the parts that are most salient.

McPherson proves himself to be a master carver, packing the pages with insightful detail.

The highlight of the book covers Lincoln's ascendency into the presidency and then his short years at the nation's helm. McPherson creates a sense of Lincoln's character by showing readers the difficult choices at hand and then explaining why Lincoln made the decisions he did.

For example, we learn about Lincoln's personal feelings toward slavery and how they were at odds with what he felt was his constitutional duty.

McPherson then shows how Lincoln figured out how to resolve those discrepancies and at the same time make a brilliant strategic military move by issuing the 1862 Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln's ability to manage crisis and move the country forward serves as a beacon of hope for contemporary readers: We are reminded by history that extreme challenges are excellent opportunities for great leaders to develop.

Read more about Abraham Lincoln and the book here, or get a copy now!

Orson Scott Card Returns With Ender In Exile

Ender in Exile

Twenty-three years have passed since Orson Scott Card first dazzled readers with Ender's Game,a seminal work that blurred the lines between young adult and adult fiction. Now, he’s back with Ender in Exilewhich picks up where the 1985 winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards, science fiction’s highest honors, left off.

The revival of Ender, the boy hero who saves Earth from bug-like aliens, goes beyond the novel’s pages with a new comic-book adaptation of the original saga and spurring interest in Hollywood as a potential film franchise.

All of this quite surprises the 57-year-old North Carolina resident, although he suspects the story still resonates partly because of its sad martial tale: Card introduces the protagonist as a 6-year-old prodigy who is bred to be Earth’s future hero, but to achieve this, Ender must train to become the perfect soldier — cunning, strong, ruthless. He is symptomatic of a war-obsessed society, a reclusive character grappling with the very grown-up issues of isolation and loneliness.

With such powerful themes, Card is at times amused by Ender’s popularity among young readers. He never intended to be a “young adult” author. He is proud, however, that the books speak to adolescents who are reading them and engaging in serious philosophical conversations during their most malleable years.

Read more about Ender In Exile, or get a copy now!

The History of The First Black Congessmen: Important New Book

Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen

Reconstruction is conventionally dated from the end of the Civil War in 1865 to 1876, the year Northern troops were withdrawn from the South, leaving the Democratic Party in control. This remarkable study by Philip Dray continues the story into the early 20th century with a final chapter relating Reconstruction to the civil-rights movement in the 1960s. Dray skillfully integrates black political leaders into the stirring, sometimes inspiring, often tragic events of the period.

He begins and ends his account with the story of Robert Smalls, a skilled slave who early in the Civil War boldly ran his master's cargo vessel past the Fort Sumter lookout to join the U.S. Navy. After several close calls raiding the Sea Islands, and a distinguished political career, including service in the South Carolina and U.S. legislatures, he retired full of honors to his home town of Beaufort, where he died in 1915.

Dray also considers the lives of two U.S. senators, Hiram Revels and Blanch K. Bruce; the colorful Pinckney Benton Stewart (P.B.S.) Pinchback, briefly the governor of Louisiana, and many other state and national legislators. George H. White of North Carolina, the last Reconstruction black to serve in the U.S. Congress, fought disenfranchisement and exposed the hypocrisy of Southern Democrats until his removal in 1901. The author also gives consideration to the lives and contributions of white Republican "carpetbaggers" from the North and "scalawags" from the South.

Constitutional amendments ending slavery and establishing blacks' civil rights and male suffrage, and the requirement that Southern states write new constitutions putting them into effect, sparked a wave of terror by the Ku Klux Klan. South Carolina's northern counties had a long history of "regional defiance," defense of "honor" and "individual bravado." "In the postwar South this line of thinking served to legitimatize all sorts of extra-legal mayhem, from shots fired under cover of night into sharecroppers' cabins, to cold-blooded assassination, race riots, and lynchings."

As Klan activities declined under pressure from Northern forces and public opinion, Southerners found group action a more effective way to resist. They would "foment some outrage or accusation against black or carpetbagger authorities, then create a physical confrontation." An anonymous mass of rioters could do more damage and demoralize more people than could the Klan. Mob actions in Mississippi included massacres of a few to more than a hundred blacks. President Ulysses S. Grant began to realize the futility of sending additional government troops to quell riots, and the appearance of black state militias inflamed Southerners who could not abide a formerly servile race keeping law and order. The Republican Mississippi governor, Adelbert Ames, a decorated Civil War general, could not win this war without government aid and finally was forced from office.

Read more about the first Black Congressmen, or get a copy now!

Love and Deception Across the Color Line: New Novel Passing Strange

Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line

Passing Strangetells a true story that would beggar most novelists' imaginations. It exposes the bizarre secret life of a well-known historical figure, but that secret is its least sensational aspect. The secret was hidden in plain sight until Martha A. Sandweiss, the deductive historian who pieced together this narrative, happened to notice it. Her great accomplishment is to have explored not only how the 19th-century explorer and scientist Clarence King reinvented himself but also why that reinvention was so singularly American. Best of all are Sandweiss's insights into what King's deception and its consequences really mean.

Clarence King has often been written about by historians, but mostly in academic books about the mapping and geological exploration of the American West. He also turns up in biographies and literary histories, since he moved in glittering circles and was once widely held in high regard. He was called "the best and the brightest man of his generation" by one close friend, Secretary of State John Hay.

King was a blond blueblood from Rhode Island who traveled West in the 1860s, found work with the California State Geological Survey, helped to map the Sierras and became geologist in charge of the U.S. Geological Exploration of the 40th Parallel in 1867, when he was 25. He then became a familiar luminary in both New York and Washington. But his early years of roaming were just a prelude to what seems to have been a permanently rootless state.

Or so it seemed to his friends, who became used to his unexpected absences and thought of him as a perennial bachelor. What they did not know was that when King was not living in various clubs and hotels, he was married and the father of five children. He was devoted to his wife, Ada, a black woman 19 years his junior and had successfully cultivated the impression that he was black too.

Read more about Passing Strange here, or get a copy now!

Award Winning Novel Has Child Narrator: Kieron Smith, Boy

Kieron Smith, boy

There are not many books out there with child narrators. It's always a risky thing for a writer to do, for the pitfalls are numerous: the writing is not convincingly childlike, the narrator can become precocious, the style annoying. Not to mention the problem that it's difficult to write on certain themes from the limited perspective of a child.

In Kieron Smith, boyJames Kelman surmounts all of these problems. Kieron is clumsy, rough, and an overlooked younger brother often faced with more limitations than limitless horizons. Growing up in 1950s rural Scotland, his days are filled with playing in the parks and by the rivers, finding "lucks" in the local junkyard, fighting with other boys, and visiting his loving grandparents. His life in the world is vigorous, dangerous, and appealing.

Stepping indoors, however, as the boy's horizon shrinks to the walls of his top-story apartment, so too does the scope and horizon of his life. Within his family, Kieron becomes the least priority, often overshadowed by his older brother Matt, who receives all the attention and affection of his parents. One wonders how much of this is accurately observed, and how much of it is — as should be expected — childlike exaggeration. Regardless, though, it is clear that as Kieron grows up, and moves to a new housing development, his opportunities and happiness continually shrink.

Despite this realism, Kieron's outlook on the challenges of life is refreshingly undaunted. Life's vagaries will inspire in the boy a railing against the unfairness of it all, which tends to be repetitive. But after falling down, Kieron unfailingly gets up and moves on to the next distraction. New schoolmates (not all of them the nicest of friends), neighborhood exploration, games of soccer, and the challenges posed to his climbing abilities by trees and buildings are the niches in which Kieron flourishes despite the unsympathetic eye by which the world often views him.

Read more about Kieron Smith, Boy, or get a copy now!