35 to 39. Various Books I've Read in the Past Month

I have been delinquent in making timely posts over the past month or so: too much travel. The period began with the completion of H.G. Wells' The First Men in the Moon, a terrific piece of allegorical science fiction that is highly critical of colonial mores; I then moved on to Larry Niven's Ring World - which I must have read in high school but forgotten. I found this book to be a little too heavy on the tech/gadgets but otherwise an entertaining science fiction story; I then moved on to Philip Attlee's Canadian Bomber Contract which is well reviewed on Olman's Fifty; I then moved on to Alan Furst's The World at Night, a spy story in occupation France. Furst's books are so light and airy that you barely feel like you've read a book and despite his efforts he is not able to add the true grit and darkness that good spy stories deserve. He is now off my list of supported authors; finally, I read Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. Gladwell is a man of big ideas and doesn't provide much in support of his big ideas. In this, his third book, he hypothesizes that people don't achieve success through just their hard work and dedication they are, more often than not, supported by particular circumstances that end up giving them an advantage over the next guy. His arguments and examples make sense but one cannot prove such a big hypothesis by anecdotes and scant references alone. Someone needs to tell him that he has ADD and if he really wants to present a compelling hypothesis then he should do the hard academic work required to back it up.