Know Your Author - Malcolm Gladwell #Outliers

Hey guys!

Welcome to Episode 3 of the Know Your Author Series from Discovery Shoppe Book Club 😁😇

We had quite a blast learning about Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace, the authors of our book for May, Creativity, Inc. It was fun to see Amy Wallace's reaction to our post on Twitter. In fact, we were jubilant in the book club 😅😁.

This June, we read Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. Sit tight to Know Your Author!

We observed that it is more interesting to read a book and finish it 😅 when you know a thing or two about the author(s). It allows you to read from their perspective, experience, background and even with their tone. So here it goes. Have fun! We hope you enjoy reading this post as much as we enjoyed writing it.

Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Timothy Gladwell CM (born 3 September 1963) is an English-born Canadian journalist, author, and public speaker. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996, and he has published seven books, the first five of which were New York Times bestsellers. His books are The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (2000); Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005); Outliers: The Story of Success (2008); What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures (2009), a collection of his journalism; David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (2013); Talking To Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know (2019) and The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War (2021).

Gladwell is also the host of the podcast, Revisionist History, and the co-founder of the podcast company Pushkin Industries. He is best known for his unique perspective on popular culture and he adeptly trod the boundary between popularizer and intellectual.

Gladwell was born in Fareham, Hampshire, England. His mother is Joyce (née Nation) Gladwell, a Jamaican psychotherapist. His father, Graham Gladwell, was a Mathematics Professor from Kent, England. Gladwell’s family moved in 1969 from England to Elmira, Ontario, where his father taught at the nearby University of Waterloo and his mother practised psychotherapy. Gladwell was unique in the agrarian surroundings of Elmira, a largely Mennonite area, since his mother was Jamaican and his father was a white Englishman. He later cited the unique perspective afforded by his heritage as a motivating factor in his “intellectual adventuring”. Gladwell has also stated that his mother is his role model as a writer.

When asked for the process behind his writing, he said: "I have two parallel things I'm interested in. One is, I'm interested in collecting interesting stories, and the other is I'm interested in collecting interesting research. What I'm looking for is cases where they overlap". Fun fact about Malcolm Gladwell: Research done by historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. revealed that one of Gladwell's maternal ancestors was a Jamaican free woman of colour (mixed black and white) who was a slave owner, and his great-great-great-grandmother was Igbo! From Nigeria! Yup, that's right, I'm as surprised as you are. He's probably related to some of us Igbo intellectuals (or not! Haha!) Also, he is a Christian, is unmarried, and has no children.

Interestingly, Gladwell was a national class runner and an Ontario High School (Ontario Federation of School Athletic Associations – OFSAA) champion. He was among Canada's fastest teenagers at 1500 metres, running 4:14:00 at the age of 13 and 4:05:00 at age 14. In college, Gladwell ran 1500 metres in 3:55:00. In 2014, at the age of 51, he ran a 4:54:00 at the Fifth Avenue Mile. Impressive!

On Awards;

Gladwell was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2011, the second-highest honour for merit in the system of orders, decorations, and medals of Canada. He was awarded two honorary degrees. He was once a Time 100: The Most Influential People in the World 2005, and he received the first Award for Excellence in the Reporting of Social Issues by the American Sociological Association.

Indeed, Gladwell's writings often deal with the unexpected implications of research in the social sciences like sociology and psychology, and he makes frequent and extended use of academic work. Little wonder there's so much to learn from Outliers: The Story of Success.

You can check him up on his website and via Twitter @Gladwell. For further information, use the following links: Gladwellbooks

Britannica/Malcolm-Gladwell

Wikipedia/Malcolm_Gladwell

NewYorker/Malcolm-Gladwell

Hachettebookgroup/Malcolm-Gladwell

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