Outliers By Malcolm Gladwell: Chapter Analysis

The second part of the book deals with a different theme than the first while still helping to establish the core idea. The second part of the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell outlines and explains the idea that your background and culture is a key part in who you are, which in turn helps explain the course of your life. As with the first part of the book this part starts with an example of how the second half idea will be explained and he starts by using a small town called Harlan Kentucky as his setting. In this town during the nineteenth century there was a feud between to families in the town that is talked about in this chapter, and those two families were called the Howard’s and Turners’. As his telling the stories of the families in

As with every chapter Malcolm Gladwell uses an event in the past that can be used as evidence that supports the theory to be explained in the chapter. This example deals with a 1997 flight of a Korean Airlines going to Guam from Seoul. The pilot of the airlines seems very confident in his ability to get to Guam safely which is established by how he says he flown to Guam many times before. This is the first in the series of problems that leads to disaster with the plain in Guam. This over confidence is continued and see lights in the distance and the Captain assumes it is Guam; however, he was wrong it was a hill outside of the airport. This mistake cannot be reversed and the plane crashes into the mountain that cause the death of most of the Passengers on the boing 747. The second part of the chapter goes through many other crashes that take place under the control of this airline and says that after all that the airline had their safety rating downgraded in 1999. Since then they have had a spotless safety record that led them to getting an award in 2006 for their safety and falling back into good grace with the aviation world. The chapter continues by giving many other examples to crashes and using their black boxes to show the difference in how they dress each other between cultures. They showed how in other countries they talk in a way were they don 't want to disrespect anyone with a higher societal standing from them. This in the chapter would be defined as mitigating, which would be to use words that assume a lesser role in the conversation making what you say sound far less important than it really was. The counter example used to show how much different that these usually south american and Asian cultures were was our own American speech. He pointed out that the way that we address each other by words alone is one an equal playing field