True Talent, True Entertainment, True Grit by Abigail Beck When my writing professor at college gave me a copy of True Grit as a graduation gift, I had no idea what I was getting into. For years I’d been telling myself that I didn’t like to read, but I was already on the path to […]
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Cancer: A Love Story by Rachel Fox Who reads books about cancer? Especially when it’s a given that a main character — with whom the writer will do their best to help you fall in love — will inevitably face a long-fought and often-painful death? Cancer rides high in our collective consciousness, as more people every […]
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Life, Curated. by Heather M. Surls My writing professor repeatedly gave two pieces of advice in his classes: be specific, definite, and concrete and avoid using “to be” verbs. He had culled these from Strunk and White, which he read five times in the army and which sits on the shelf under my desk, spine cracked with use, […]
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Gladwell Gets Spiritual by Andrew Collins “The Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” So opens Malcolm Gladwell’s newest book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants. The quote comes from the biblical account of the story of David, who […]
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Infernal Combustion Engine by James Roland For the layman, every car runs by magic. Under the hood lies an oil-slick mass of tubes and pipes and fire, bound together by basic science, brought to life with a simple flick of a key, but when it roars to life it becomes something far more than its […]
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Gladwell, a Retrospective by Andrew Collins Reading Malcolm Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw feels like playing the first album of a favorite band. We love the group’s chart-topping hit albums, but there’s something special about revisiting its earliest music. It may be rough and disconnected in some places, but the sound is there — that […]
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The American Fever Dream by James Roland Americans look east for their fantasy — borrowing Tolkien’s dream worlds and Ireland’s fairies to escape from everyday doldrums or, if they happen to be artists, for inspiration. But for British writer Christopher Neilan, the grass is always greener on the other side of the pond, so he set […]
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In the end, Gladwell brings a call to both optimism and humility. He invites those who have already climbed the ladder of success to look back at all the rungs of cultural heritage and unique opportunities that allowed them to get there . . . To those just beginning to step out into life and make something of themselves, he obviously recommends hard work, but work tempered with an eye for opportunities.
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Editor’s Note: In more than two decades of journalism, at The Washington Post and then The New Yorker magazine, Malcolm Gladwell has fed his curiosity with innumerable questions and has swept his audience along on countless journeys of discovery. When the ideas just got too big for articles, he started writing books — three in […]
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Hell Is Where the Heart Is by James Roland Ignatius Perrish seems like a really nice guy. He volunteers at his church, plans to travel the world as a philanthropist, and spends his free time cracking jokes with his pals over bottles of cheap beer. All his friends call him Ig. But everyone else calls […]
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