In Sunday's Sun, read a review Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers by Chauncey Mabe of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Some excerpts from the review: Successful people, Gladwell says in Outliers, his third book, are the product not of genius, or talent, or ambition, or even hard work. ... Aha! So that’s how Gladwell, a middling writer for The New Yorker, became a literary star with an ill-deserved reputation as an original thinker, able to command a $40,000 speaking fee.

Gladwell follows a strategy honed at The New Yorker and perfected in his previous books, The Tipping Point and Blink, best-sellers both. He surveys the work of researchers and genuine thinkers, connects some dots (not all of which fit comfortably), coins some cool phrases, and presents it all in a breezy style.

That’s not to say Outliers isn’t a pleasurable, modestly informative way to spend a few hours, in the manner of a Discovery Channel documentary. Gladwell explains why star hockey players are almost always born near the beginning of the year, why Bill Gates became rich and famous, why Korean airline pilots used to have a propensity for flying perfectly good airliners into the ground, why so few people with extremely high IQs win the Nobel Prize.