47 Things to See, Hear, and Do This Fall

Sometimes a book is so successful that it defines an entirely new category around itself. The Tipping Point and Blink were like that: they created a whole new bookstore-aisle of pop psycho-socio-economics, full of Black Swans and Long Tails and God knows what else. Now Gladwell is back to prove that he still rules the house that he built. In Outliers, he looks at what makes the ultra-ultra-successful different from you and me — the Beatles, the Bill Gateses and so on. It's not their brains, per se, Gladwell argues. To spot the difference you have to look at their backgrounds: their childhoods, their families, the culture in which they grew up.

— Lev Grossman