Book and Movie Reports by Ed

Book report: Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell Okay, I'm officially a Malcolm Gladwell fanboy. I read and loved "Blink" and "The Tipping Point". First off, he has brilliantly clever ideas. Then, he does an amazing amount of research of all kinds to delve into unexpected aspects of these ideas. Finally, he writes so clearly and beautifully about each of these topics that it's a pleasure to read. For example, "Outliers" starts with a fascinating presentation of the immigration of poor peasants from a small Italian village to a town in Pennsylvania. His storytelling is wonderful, but then he provides an unexpected puzzle: in this little town, heart disease is practically unknown. How can this be? His examination – and elimination – of all the obvious possibilities introduces the main theme of "Outliers": the reasons behind success. In statistics, an outlier is a data point that lies far beyond most of the other data points. In the world of

Book report: Velocity, by Dean Koontz I guess that bestselling novelists can get away with this. By "this" I mean 416 pages of filler wrapped around a plot that makes no sense. I picked this book up because I was looking for something escapist to read. I had enjoyed a couple of Koontz's thousand other novels. "Lightning" was a pretty good science fiction story. Maybe "enjoyed" doesn't really apply to his "Intensity" as much as "held on with both hands afraid to let go". Anyway, that's why I started reading "Velocity". It begins with several dozen pages of a barroom windbag that, as near as I can tell, has nothing to do with the rest of the story. I can see how these bestselling authors can turn a fairly slim story into a brick of a book. Description. Lots of description. What the bar looks like. What the glasses look like. What everything looks like. When, later, a character walks up to a house, we get every