Forum LEVEL

(...) It had seen the lark go up, and had circled to gain height before making and attack. From behind, the merlin's wings looked very straight. They seemed to move up and down with a shallow flicking action, a febrile pulsation, much faster than any other falcon's. It reached the lark in a few seconds, and they fell away towards the west, jerking and twisting together, the lark still singing. It looked like a swallow chasing a bee. They rushed down the sky in zigzags and I lost them in the green of the distant fields.

Their rapid, shifting, dancing motion had been so deft and graceful that it was difficult to belive that hunger was the cause of it and death the end. The killing that follows the hunting flight of hawks comes with shocking force, as though the hawk had suddenly gone mad and had killed the thing it loved. The striving of birds to kill, or to save themselves from death, is beautiful to see. The greater the beauty the more terrible the death.

4/5
An excellent read that digs deeper and offers a new perspective into something that is rather often superficially analysed: what it takes to be successful. I did learn new things and I consider this book to be a must have. The lack of that final star is due to the tendency of some chapters, in particular the one on Korean pilots, to drag on seemingly forever.

Gladwell's critics have described him as prone to oversimplification. The New Republic called the final chapter of Outliers, "impervious to all forms of critical thinking" and said Gladwell believes "a perfect anecdote proves a fatuous rule". Gladwell has also been criticized for his emphasis on anecdotal evidence over research to support his conclusions. Maureen Tkacik and Steven Pinker have challenged the integrity of Gladwell's approach. Even while praising Gladwell's writing style and content, Pinker summed up Gladwell as "a minor genius who unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of statistical reasoning", while accusing him of "cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies" in his book Outliers. Referencing a Gladwell reporting mistake in which Gladwell refers to "eigenvalue" as "Igon Value", Pinker criticizes his lack of expertise: "I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer's education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong." A writer in The Independent accused Gladwell of posing "obvious" insights. The Register has accused Gladwell of making arguments by weak analogy and commented Gladwell has an "aversion for fact", adding: "Gladwell has made a career out of handing simple, vacuous truths to people and dressing them up with flowery language and an impressionistic take on the scientific method." In that regard, The New Republic has called him "America's Best-Paid Fairy-Tale Writer". His approach was satirized by the online site "The Malcolm Gladwell Book Generator".

Iavo wrote:Soarecu', nu pot decat sa iti ofer acelasi sfat pe care l-am primit si eu cand eram mai mic de la ceva matusa foarte lucida: "Nu mai citi asa mult, ce, vrei sa ajungi Ceausescu?".