Good fortune: Malcolm Gladwell rethinks the secret to success.

AuthorWallace-Wells, David
PositionON POLITICAL BOOKS

Outliers: The Story of Success

by Malcolm Gladwell

Little, Brown and Company, 310 pp.

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Before he became the peculiar boss of the Manhattan Project, the physicist Robert Oppenheimer was a peculiar young man. On a train to meet his parents while studying at Cambridge, he abruptly kissed a strange woman, then fell to his knees to apologize, and then, at the station, attempted to drop his suitcase on her. He trapped his mother in a locked hotel room; he tried to strangle a close friend with a trunk strap. A psychoanalyst made a diagnosis we would now call schizophrenia; other doctors backed away, intimidated by Oppenheimer's intellect, an effect common with sociopaths. His life in Cambridge was a "miserable hole," Oppenheimer later recalled, and to comfort himself he'd "get down on the floor and roll from side to side." He tried to kill his faculty adviser with a poisoned apple.

How did this man get that job? Oppenheimer was only thirty-eight when he was hired to run Los Alamos and lead what was probably the most ambitious engineering project, and certainly the most closely guarded government program, in American history to date. He was an inexperienced theoretician in a contentious community of hardheaded experimentalists, surly, withdrawn, and inexperienced as a manager, a Communist fellow traveler with a history of mental illness. Who would put the fate of the earth in his hands? And what could compel them to do it?

The answer, journalist Malcolm Gladwell writes in his assertive Outliers: The Story of Success, a whistle-stop tour of opportunity and achievement, was culture--and not midcentury American culture, starched with meritocratic values and solicitous of talent of any temperament, but the exclusive and cosmopolitan culture of Oppenheimer's New York boyhood.

Raised among the wealthy and educated with the brightest and most cultivated of their children, Oppenheimer knew his physics, but he also knew his classics, knew his Proust, his Tolstoy, and his Dostoevsky, knew about architecture and enjoyed horseback riding, knew the tiny islands of the Mediterranean and what it was like to ride through Europe in a Packard driven by a family chauffeur. More important, Gladwell writes, he knew his way around the corridors of power, and he knew what to say to the people one met there. He was a charmer; he could schmooze. Oppenheimer was raised in rarefied quarters and was welcomed into them again as an adult, Gladwell says...

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