Thomas Hardy’s quote, “A story must be exceptional enough to justify its telling; it must have something more unusual than the ordinary experience of every average man and woman” embodies what makes a story valuable and worth telling. Everyone’s lives are full of intertangling stories; yet, the story that sets itself apart is one that talks of events that are not commonplace: extraordinary. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell and Beloved by Toni Morrison set themselves apart; they are extraordinary.
Beloved is a story of people who refuse to back down, even in the face of extreme injustice. Its tale is a piece of history that deals with slavery, suffering, and freedom; however, this novel is not a view of slavery, and its effects on former slaves,
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However, that short explanation hardly does the book any justice. Through his writing, Gladwell doesn't just explain how the world works; he makes the reader question everything in the world around them-- something the famed author is known for. He takes the reader’s pre-existing notions behind success and twists them into a new shape that, oddly, makes sense. What makes Outliers unique is that it doesn't tell us what we want to hear. It rebuts the conventional “anything can be achieved through hard work” by telling us that success is outside the grasps of those who simply “want it.” Gladwell challenges assumptions about innate genius and natural-born talent and explains away these gifts by attributing them to practice, timing, circumstance, upbringing, culture, and opportunity. In other words, the hallmark examples of brilliant, successful people that most people admire—Mozart, Bill Gates, the Beatles—weren't born with natural talent as many people think. Instead, as Gladwell insists, they had the right upbringing, were in the right place at the right time, and through somewhere around 10,000 hours of hard work and a few lucky opportunities, landed