Local readers veering away from self-help genre

OUT of the top 10 non-fiction bestsellers in Times’ national chart, Malcolm Gladwell’s books take four places. In pole position is Outliers, in third spot Blink followed by What the Dog Saw and Tipping Point.

The monotony in ranking is only to be broken by second-placed SuperFreakonomics, co-authored by flamboyant economist Steven Levitt and Stephen J Dubner. This is their sequel to Freakonomics.

What do these books have in common? They are of the same genre, challenging readers to think by asking unexpected questions for answers. More important for answers is asking the right questions.

In Outliers: The Story of Success, Gladwell unravels the things or phenomena that lie outside normal experiences. As in his earlier bestsellers, he builds his case around real people and told in a refreshing angle. We pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where successful people are from: their culture, their family and their generation.

The book explains what Bill Gates, the Beatles and other world-class successes have in common, how culture affects their careers and performance. You want to know why Asians shine in Maths?

It would be worthwhile for our political and corporate leaders to read the book to help Malaysia move towards a high income economy so that we can synthesise the strength of our multi-cultural heritage.

Outliers overturns many of our conventional notions about what makes a person successful. In the process, it creates an entirely new model for nurturing success and suggests ways to give people the best opportunities to succeed.

“Because we so profoundly personalise success, we squander human potential. We miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung,” he said of the book.

Fans of Freakonomics will not be disappointed with SuperFreakonomics. As in most sequels which build on the success of the first, the subsequent ones tend to be rehashed, SuperFreakonomics promises to be bolder, funnier and more surprising. Its authors Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner pop us with questions we have no time to think about.

SuperFreakonomics: global cooling, patriotic prostitutes and why suicide bombers should buy life insurance. It challenges our view of the way the world really works.

Levitt is economist extraordinaire while Dubner a renowned New York Times investigative reporter. Their combined talents make them a formidable pair in exploring the hidden side of everything. Even if you hardly grasp school-level economics, this book will definitely open your eyes to the everyday economics of choices.

Applying Freakonomics may arouse the reader to be more skeptical of conventional wisdom, looking for signs that things may not be what they first appear to be. Perhaps it will motivate the reader to search out data and come up with a new idea.

Underlying Freakonomics is the study of incentives, which are ways to get people to do good rather than bad things. The three types of incentives – economic, social and moral. It claims that economists have a way of manipulating incentives to tempt human behaviour.

Levitt and Dubner mix smart thinking and great storytelling like no one else, whether investigating a solution to global warming or grappling with which is more dangerous: drink driving or drunk walking. By explaining how people respond to incentives, they show the world for what it really is – good, bad, ugly and in the final analysis, super freaky.

“You don’t start at the top if you want to find the story. You start in the middle, because it’s the people in the middle who do the actual work in the world,” writes Gladwell in the preface to What the Dog Saw. In each piece, he offers a glimpse into the minds of a startling array of fascinating characters. “We want to know what it feels like to be a doctor,” he insists, rather than what doctors do every day, because “Curiosity about the interior life of other people’s day-to-day work is one of the most fundamental of human impulses.” Like no other writer today, Gladwell satisfies this impulse brilliantly, energizing and challenging his readers.

Blink! He who winks first, loses. No, it’s more than that. It’s a book about the kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an eye. How we make up our minds on the first few seconds. Galdwell says, “Well, Blink is a book about those two seconds, because I think those instant conclusions that we reach are really powerful and really important and, occasionally, really good.

Tipping Point is inspired by the AIDS epidemic. It’s the point of time when a virus reaches critical mass. It’s the boiling point. Or the moment on the graph when the line starts to shoot straight upwards.

What if everything has a Tipping Point? The book is an attempt to look for Tipping Points in business, or in social policy, or in advertising or in any number of other non-medical areas.

In sixth and seventh placing are A New Earth by Ekhart Tolle and Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret. They deal with spiritualism and metaphysics.

A New Earth emphasises on the awareness of the present and the dismantling of the ego as the path towards awakened living. Are we dependent on what happens for our happiness?

The Secret’s Byrne claims every human being has the ability to transform any weakness or suffering into strength, power, peace, health and abundance.

The Artdaily describes EH Gombrich’s A Little History of the World, “A lively and involving history… This is a text dominated not by dates and facts, but by the sweep of mankind’s experience across the centuries, a guide to humanity’s achievement and acute witness to its frailties.” Originally written for children but also suitable for adults.

Driven to Distraction, surprisingly, is the ninth bestseller. It dispels a variety of myths on attention deficit disorder (ADD).

Happiness in Hard Times (Andrew Matthews) makes up the number 10. Is it a sign that the self-help movement is taking a backseat when it once commanded popular following up to the early 1990s?