Malcolm Gladwell, former Washington Post science reporter turned New Yorker staff writer, scored big with his first two non-fiction books, The Tipping Point and Blink, both of which plumbed aspects of human behavior. Outliers: The Story of Success (Little, Brown, $27.99) returns to that same field, but looks for a slightly different crop. This time, he’s interested in finding out what distinguishes people “who do something special with their lives” from everyone else. In other words, he’s trying to suss out whether intelligence, experience, or background — or a combination of all three — can be credited with helping some people to succeed while others do not. It sounds like a simple scenario, but the idiosyncratically minded Gladwell never looks for simple answers. Instead, he heads off in a dozen divergent intellectual directions, analyzing the childhood of Microsoft’s Bill Gates, examining why some soccer players excel and why Asians are good at mathematics, and identifying the factors that led to the Beatles becoming the world’s greatest rock band. Even knowing why some people excelled in the past, though, may not be sufficient; Gladwell contends that mastering a field in the 21st century could involve less individual, isolated genius than wise collaboration and diligence. As Gladwell has said before, “A scientific genius is not a person who does what no one else can do; he or she is someone who does what it takes many others to do.” — Jeff Pierce