Fascinating and readable -- will make you look at the world differently. I'm going to be thinking about the ethnic theory of plane crashes and the "culture of honor" for a while. 
 As with The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, I loved the evidence but wanted a little more from the conclusions -- I suppose when the world is revealed to have patterns heretofore unseen, I want to know how to make them work for me, but there is little controlling them, only trying to understand the ways they affect us. However, as Gladwell says at the end, "To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success -- the fortunate birth dates and the happy accidents of history -- with a society that provides opportunities for all." 
 Favorite quotes: 
 "No one was used to thinking about health in terms of community." 
 "Achievement is talent plus preparation." 
 "Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good." 
 "But what truly distinguishes their histories is not their extraordinary talent but their extraordinary opportunities." 
 "We pretend that success is exclusively a matter of individual merit. But there's nothing in any of the histories we've looked at so far to suggest things are that simple. These are stories, instead, about people who were given a special opportunity to work really hard and seized it, and who happened to come of age at a time when that extraordinary effort was rewarded by the rest of society." (timing is everything?) 
 "...that's not because [Oppenheimer] was smarter than Chris Langan. It's because he possessed the kind of savvy that allowed him to get what he wanted from the world." 
 "They lacked something that could have been given to them if we'd only known they'd needed it: a community around them that prepared them properly for the world." 
 "But as is so often the case with outliers, buried in that setback was a golden opportunity." 
 "For twenty years [Flom] perfected his craft at Skadden, Arps. Then the world changed and he was ready. He didn't triumph over adversity. Instead, what started out as adversity ended up being an opportunity." 
 "Those three things -- autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward -- are, most people agree, the three qualities work has to have if it is to be satisfying." 
 "Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you...dance a jig." 
 "You have to be quite strong to fly that airplane. You heave it around the sky. It's as much physical effort as rowing a boat." 
 "a hint is the hardest kind of request to decode and the easiest to refuse." 
 "Planes are safer when the least experienced pilot is flying, because it means the second pilot isn't going to be afraid to speak up." 
 "Each of us has his or her own distinct personality. But overlaid on top of that are tendencies and assumptions and reflections handed down to us by the history of the community we grew up in, and those differences are extraordinarily specific." 
 "Virtually all of the advantage that wealthy students have over poor students is the result of differences in the way privileged kids learn when they are not in school."