A very, very good read, and one that I think anyone who's interested in how our society has gotten to be the way it is should read. Malcolm Gladwell confronts two of the common misconceptions that we have about success- both extreme individualism and extreme collectivism- and shows that the truth is both more complex and more interesting. Full of examples and hard data, Malcolm backs up his thesis with both narrative and academic verve. 
 Perhaps most intriguing, however, is how he concludes the book. Is it possible to manufacture outliers? Is it in the realm of possibility to predict what will cause individuals to achieve practically unmitigated success? When the factors that he recounts are so distinct, and in some cases so apparently random, is it really feasible to attempt recreating the conditions that lead to these outliers? 
 If it's possible, then Malcolm might well be pointing the way to a societal revolution the likes of which are practically unparalleled. But therein is the question: it's one thing to be able to retrospectively point out the unexpected causes of a Bill Gates or a Joe Flom, but does that knowledge help us to create the conditions where we can have, as Malcolm puts it, thousands of either? Time and the proper cultural changes alone can say, but sadly, I fear that we'll never learn whether he was right or not simply because we're unwilling to take those risks, or to believe in that vision.