This week I finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's new book "Outliers." I, like everyone else who has read them, really enjoyed his previous books, "The Tipping Point" and "Blink," so I was anxious to see the next thing he'd come up with. I even got on a waiting list at the library that was originally over 200 people long.

Honestly, I have mixed feelings about the book. I think he presents a very interesting and illuminating thesis, and he does it well, but in the end, I don't think I was as convinced as he wanted me to be.

Essentially, the idea presented in "Outliers" can be summed up in two statements: Sometimes the thing that makes one person better at something than anyone else is a random circumstance largely out of his control. And practice makes perfect.

Surely it's no huge revelation that someone who has more practice at a given thing will be better than someone who has less practice. Gladwell goes so far as to quantify it, though, claiming that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become a master musician or a master computer programmer. That's a lot of time. But upon this initial stepping stone he places another wrinkle: sometimes people get their 10,000 hours of practice because they were simply lucky enough to be in a place that allowed them to do so.

He gives examples of the Beatles, who played thousands of hours of concerts in their early days in Hamburg, and of Bill Gates, who logged thousands of hours of programming on a free computer when he was in high school (when most people didn't yet know what a computer was). The Beatles just happened to get the invitation to play in Hamburg, and Gates just happened to attend a school that had a computer and lived within walking distance of the University of Washington, which let him use their computer after hours. The most convincing example was a demonstration that Canadian hockey stars are generally born in the first few months of the year, because the best players in age-group-based little-league hockey are the oldest and biggest ones, so they get the best training and get sent on to the next level.

The question is, though: Weren't there other bands playing every night for eight hours at a stretch in Hamburg? Didn't all the other kids in Bill Gates' high school also have access to a computer? Gladwell doesn't dismiss talent and initiative, but I think that even with his selected examples, those factors played a far bigger part than the random happenstances he focuses on.

In the second half of the book, which focuses on the effects of cultural inheritance, he totally lost me. He spends a huge number of pages talking about airplane crashes, and claiming that two particular crashes - one with Korean pilots and one with Colombian pilots - would not have happened if the pilots had come from a culture that believed more in standing up for yourself. (The co-pilots could have averted the crashes had they asserted themselves more about how to fix the problems.) He makes huge generalizations based on these two isolated incidents. There just wasn't enough evidence that it was the pilots' nationalities and not their personalities that doomed them for me to buy into the premise. But even if it were true, I'm not sure the point is related to the thesis of the book. He's trying to say that cultural forces shape us and at least partially determine whether we'll succeed, but he's focusing entirely on failures in a very specific and unusual circumstance (flying a plane in dangerous conditions). That doesn't help me understand how someone can be an outlier - better than everyone else like the Beatles or Bill Gates.

He closes with an extended anecdote about his mulatto Jamaican mother, who by chance got some really good opportunities in life, which allowed her to meet the man she married and live a wonderful life. Again, he's trying to show that chance determined her destiny. But Mrs. Gladwell is not an outlier. She's not better than anyone else in the world. Sure, she had a better life than many of her Jamaican peers, but she's no Bill Gates. No one will dispute the point that chance plays an important role in determining the course of your life. Make a wrong step and get hit by a bus. Your first choice is already booked when you ask her for a date so you ask out your second choice and end up marrying her. Big whoop.

But here's the really crucial point. Malcolm Gladwell is such a good writer, I don't really care about all of these criticisms I've just leveled against him. "Outliers" is a great book. I highly recommend it. Even when he's getting bogged down making his airplane crash point, the stories and language are well-paced and engaging. I still didn't want to put the book down, even though I wasn't really being convinced of anything and even when the whole second half felt like filler. It was engaging filler. Somehow, Gladwell must have been able to put in 10,000 hours at writing, because I will still anxiously read anything he writes.