Malcolm Gladwell has made a career for himself – as well as a lot of money – thinking aloud of the untold back-stories to many political and cultural institutions. For example, this curious journalist recently examined Atticus Finch, the white lawyer played by Gregory Peck in the 1962 film adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird.
While most film historians consider Finch to be one of the greatest on-screen heroes, Gladwell argued that the character was an example of “the limits of Southern liberalism” during the story’s time period, and that Finch was not the racial justice activist as he’s been seen historically.
Speaking about the Finch’s reaction to the wrongly accused Tom Robinson for raping a white woman, Gladwell said this:
“If Finch were a civil-rights hero, he would be brimming with rage at the unjust verdict. But he isn’t. He’s not Thurgood Marshall looking for racial salvation through the law. He’s Jim Folsom, looking for racial salvation through hearts and minds.”
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Gladwell’s back-story provides some insight into how the man with a funny Afro came to be one of the country’s most sought-after intellectuals. Gladwell is a Canuck, by way of a British professor father, Jamaican psychotherapist mother and a possible blood relationship with Gen. Colin Powell.
His life as an international bestselling author of four books, analyzing how everyday events, large and small, affect humanity, has landed him a gig at the New Yorker, which allows him to examine life’s alternative histories.
He is paid tens of thousands of dollars to speak to packed rooms about his “10,000-Hour Rule,” his claim that the key to success in any field largely depends on practicing a specific task for a total of 10,000 hours. So what is the secret to his success?
“Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade,” he said in the preface to his new book, What the Dog Saw: and other adventures.
“Not the kind of writing that you’ll find in this book, anyway. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else’s head—even if in the end you conclude that someone else’s head is not a place you’d really like to be.”