Outliers - Rated 
A truly life changing book, on a level with the 'God Delusion' - sorry Dorque. Gladwell collects information and statistics from widely unusual places and sources - from the birthdays of the Canadian hockey team to Korean aircrew to rice growing in asia, jewish immigrants in New York - and uses them to present a wholly different view of how and why people achieve success in whatever field they are in. Written in the form of a series of stories that suddenly expand laterally in unexpected directions it is completely readable, fascinating and world changing.
Not bad, but not as good as its' predecessors. - Rated 
As usual, Malcolm Gladwell has come up with a different spin on topics most of us take for granted, if we think about them at all. This time around he looks at the nature of success, who achieves it and why. Gladwell has a nice easy accessible style of writing and certainly he makes you look at things through different eyes. I felt he was on slightly thinner ground some of his theses here, and some of his arguments provoked a 'so what' shrug rather than any sense of enlightenment. He's always worth reading, but if you're new to Gladwell start with The Tipping Point to get the synapses firing.
Engaging, but.... - Rated 
An engaging enough read, but as several other reviewers have indicated, this is primarily a set of anecdotes that lend support to what must be a fairly non-controversial primary theory (i.e. the more hours you commit to something the better you are at it, and you don't get really, really good at anything unless you do put in the hours). The theory is stretched at times; yes the Beatles played live for many, many hours in Hamburg, but their phenomenal success surely has something to do with the quality of their song writing (not mentioned) as well as their hard work playing live?
The more interesting theory for me was that cultural inheritance should have such a large impact on behaviours. This is illustrated in the stories about Korean Air, and the experiment on university students from the South of the US versus the North. Whilst it should not be surprising that cultural norms are deep rooted and long lasting, I think there are lessons to be learned in allowing more for such differences in cross cultural communications and for understanding how such norms appear to be so persistent.
Likewise the social implications of the fascinating tests into how much of the improvement in school kid's test results is due to what they learn at school versus what they learn in the holiday period could be further explored. It reminded me of my Grandfather who was a teacher and when challenged as to the length of school holidays used to argue that it was the teachers who needed such long holidays. When asked why this was the case he would point out, with a perfectly straight face, that teachers were exhausted because there was so much to fit in during such short terms.
Anecdotal and Thoroughly Entertaining - Rated
I notice some of the reviews here point to the fact that there's too little content here which is explored too exhaustively - but I feel that's a little unfair. As usual, Gladwell walks the line between being an anecdotal story-teller and an informed researcher very well, using the skills he picked up as a newspaper-man to the absolute peak.
That said, Outliers isn't as much of an eye-opener as The Tipping Point or his later work, Blink. But still, his account of how much talent is down to tutoring, luck and an innate gift is brilliantly conveyed through his choice of wonderfully demonstrated examples.
Using The Beatles as a way of demonstrating how hours and hours of practice combine to make an expert musician is a stroke of genius - as most music fans consider their idols to have some kind of inherent genius - one they were born with. And Bill Gates is a similar example of someone presumed to be monumentally gifted, yet here Gladwell demonstrates exactly how his success is largely down to the old idiom 'right time, right place'.
As a trained psychologist who works with people with self esteem issues - Get Real! Relationship Success is an Inside Job - it's reassuring to see a popular author exploring and destroying the myths around the concept of special, lucky people and proving the common sense notion that success is an earned and deserved prospect rather than a stroke of good fortune.
A simple illustrated thesis - Rated
The book thesis is fairly simple. Success is less about talent than opportunity. Success is a combination of hard work (at least 10000 practice hours) skills and environment.
The thesis is illustrated through a series of anecdotal examples in a wide array of disciplines.
It is well written and entertaining.
There are also several original analysis on cultural distinctions that are quite interesting. For example, the root cause for Asian people's propensity for hard work would be the culture of rice that requires extreme care all year long. It opposes that hard-working mentality to the work-rest balance western mentality, potentially explained by the concept of the fallow.
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