Inferno by Dan Brown

Dan Brown's Official Website
About Dan Brown
About Inferno
View the World Population

Dante's Inferno  (I didn't investigate any of those sites much so explore at your own risk.)

Here's Julie's slide show (you can scroll down, but if you click on a picture it will actually pop up as a slide show where you can see everything better:

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. 
The story of success. Bill Gates, the Beatles, Oppenheimer. 
Do you agree with Malcolm Gladwell? Were you inspired to make your own success story or disheartened by his explanation of how to get there? 

I was inspired and relieved; inspired to be grateful for the opportunities and family contributions leading to my successes, opportunities that I never created myself. Thank you! I felt relief to think some failures are also missed opportunities or specialized upbringing. Now I must go out into the world and create my own opportunities for success!

Q and A with Malcolm (source)

1. What is an “Outlier”?

“Outlier” is a scientific term to describe things or phenomena that lie outside normal experience. In the summer, in Paris, we expect most days to be somewhere between warm and very hot. But imagine if you had a day in the middle of August where the temperature fell below freezing. That day would be outlier. And while we have a very good understanding of why summer days in Paris are warm or hot, we know a good deal less about why a summer day in Paris might be freezing cold. In this book I’m interested in people who are outliers—in men and women who, for one reason or another, are so accomplished and so extraordinary and so outside of ordinary experience that they are as puzzling to the rest of us as a cold day in August.

2. Why did you write Outliers?

I write books when I find myself returning again and again, in my mind, to the same themes. I wrote The Tipping Point because I was fascinated by the sudden drop in crime in New York City—and that fascination grew to an interest in the whole idea of epidemics and epidemic processes. I wrote Blink because I began to get obsessed, in the same way, with the way that all of us seem to make up our minds about other people in an instant—without really doing any real thinking. In the case of Outliers, the book grew out a frustration I found myself having with the way we explain the careers of really successful people. You know how you hear someone say of Bill Gates or some rock star or some other outlier—”they’re really smart” or “they’re really ambitious?” Well, I know lots of people who are really smart and really ambitious, and they aren’t worth 60 billion dollars. It struck me that our understanding of success was really crude—and there was an opportunity to dig down and come up with a better set of explanations.

3. In what way are our explanations of success “crude?”

That’s a bit of a puzzle because we certainly don’t lack for interest in the subject. If you go to the bookstore, you can find a hundred success manuals, or biographies of famous people, or self-help books that promise to outline the six keys to great achievement. (Or is it seven?) So we should be pretty sophisticated on the topic. What I came to realize in writing Outliers, though, is that we’ve been far too focused on the individual—on describing the characteristics and habits and personality traits of those who get furthest ahead in the world. And that’s the problem, because in order to understand the outlier I think you have to look around them—at their culture and community and family and generation. We’ve been looking at tall trees, and I think we should have been looking at the forest.

4. Can you give some examples?

Sure. For example, one of the chapters looks at the fact that a surprising number of the most powerful and successful corporate lawyers in New York City have almost the exact same biography: they are Jewish men, born in the Bronx or Brooklyn in the mid-1930′s to immigrant parents who worked in the garment industry. Now, you can call that a coincidence. Or you can ask—as I do—what is about being Jewish and being part of the generation born in the Depression and having parents who worked in the garment business that might have something to do with turning someone into a really, really successful lawyer? And the answer is that you can learn a huge amount about why someone reaches the top of that profession by asking those questions.

5. Doesn’t that make it sound like success is something outside of an individual’s control?

I don’t mean to go that far. But I do think that we vastly underestimate the extent to which success happens because of things the individual has nothing to do with. Outliers opens, for example, by examining why a hugely disproportionate number of professional hockey and soccer players are born in January, February and March. I’m not going to spoil things for you by giving you the answer. But the point is that very best hockey players are people who are talented and work hard but who also benefit from the weird and largely unexamined and peculiar ways in which their world is organized. I actually have a lot of fun with birthdates in Outliers. Did you know that there’s a magic year to be born if you want to be a software entrepreneur? And another magic year to be born if you want to be really rich? In fact, one nine year stretch turns out to have produced more Outliers than any other period in history. It’s remarkable how many patterns you can find in the lives of successful people, when you look closely.

6. What’s the most surprising pattern you uncovered in the book?

It’s probably the chapter nearly the end of Outliers where I talk about plane crashes. How good a pilot is, it turns out, has a lot to do with where that pilot is from—that is, the culture he or she was raised in. I was actually stunned by how strong the connection is between culture and crashes, and it’s something that I would never have dreamed was true, in a million years.

7. Wait. Does this mean that there are some airlines that I should avoid?

Yes. Although, as I point out in Outliers, by acknowledging the role that culture plays in piloting, some of the most unsafe airlines have actually begun to clean up their act.

8. In The Tipping Point, you had an entire chapter on suicide. In Blink, you ended the book with a long chapter on the Diallo shooting—and now plane crashes. Do you have a macabre side?

Yes! I’m a frustrated thriller writer! But seriously, there’s a good reason for that. I think that we learn more from extreme circumstances than anything else; disasters tell us something about the way we think and behave that we can’t learn from ordinary life. That’s the premise of Outliers. It’s those who lie outside ordinary experience who have the most to teach us.

9. How does this book compare toBlink and The Tipping Point?

It’s different, in the sense that it’s much more focused on people and their stories. The subtitle—”The Story of Success”—is supposed to signal that. A lot of the book is an attempt to describe the lives of successful people, but to tell their stories in a different way than we’re used to. I have a chapter that deals, in part, with explaining the extraordinary success of Bill Gates. But I’m not interested in anything that happened to him past the age of about 17. Or I have a chapter explaining why Asian schoolchildren are so good at math. But it’s focused almost entirely on what the grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great grandparents of those schoolchildren did for a living. You’ll meet more people in Outliers than in my previous two books.

10. What was your most memorable experience in researching Outliers?

There were so many! I’ll never forget the time I spent with Chris Langan, who might be the smartest man in the world. I’ve never been able to feel someone’s intellect before, the way I could with him. It was an intimidating experience, but also profoundly heartbreaking—as I hope becomes apparent in “The Trouble with Geniuses” chapter. I also went to south China and hung out in rice paddies, and went to this weird little town in eastern Pennsylvania where no one ever has a heart attack, and deciphered aircraft “black box” recorders with crash investigators. I should warn all potential readers that once you get interested in the world of plane crashes, it becomes very hard to tear yourself away. I’m still obsessed.

11. What do you want people to take away from Outliers?

I think this is the way in which Outliers is a lot like Blink and The Tipping Point. They are all attempts to make us think about the world a little differently. The hope with The Tipping Point was it would help the reader understand that real change was possible. With Blink, I wanted to get people to take the enormous power of their intuition seriously. My wish with Outliers is that it makes us understand how much of a group project success is. When outliers become outliers it is not just because of their own efforts. It’s because of the contributions of lots of different people and lots of different circumstances— and that means that we, as a society, have more control about who succeeds—and how many of us succeed—than we think. That’s an amazingly hopeful and uplifting idea.

12. I noticed that the book is dedicated to “Daisy.” Who is she?

Daisy is my grandmother. She was a remarkable woman, who was responsible for my mother’s success—for the fact that my mother was able to get out of the little rural village in Jamaica where she grew up, get a university education in England and ultimately meet and marry my father. The last chapter ofOutliers is an attempt to understand how Daisy was able to make that happen—using all the lessons learned over the course of the book. I’ve never written something quite this personal before. I hope readers find her story as moving as I did.

Here is a plug for my favorite success story,  ;)  who had the perfect balance of opportunity, practice, familial upbringing, deliberate and instinctive choices, and loving motivation for all the success he achieved. 

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

This entry has been pieced together a bit at a time over the
course of a couple weeks so I hope it comes together in a coherent manner.  Here goes . . .
Jane Eyre was assigned reading for my High School Women's Literature class and I never got past Jane's days at Lowood.  When I went to BYU somehow it kept coming up and it seemed everyone loved it, so I decided to give it another try and forced my way past that beginning section. [I've noticed this is a common thing with the Bronte novels.  It seems there's often a bit at the beginning that either serves no purpose or what purpose it does serve could be summed up in a few paragraphs.  I've read 5 of the 7 that the sisters wrote and I think they all have that element.]  Anyway, I loved it and got a bit obsessed about the Bronte family.  I'm not the only one.
John had checked this out for me and while it is called The Bronte Sisters, it has more about Branwell than many accounts.  It's a young adult biography so it's a pretty quick read.
The online world gives us a chance to peep into others obsessions with the Brontes and their novels.
Here is a post murmuring about the new editions blatantly copying the Twilight covers.  Reader, I don't get the sameness.
She includes a link to Jane Eyre Illustrated with a variety of illustrations and cover art.  And here's a link to a blog devoted entirely to the Bronte Sisters.
Ask the primary kids.  I love to show pictures.  So here is the Bronte clan.

Patrick Bronte

Maria Branwell Bronte

Aunt Elizabeth Branwell

Charlotte's Husband, Arthur Nicholls Bell

Branwell Bronte

The four Bronte siblings.
As far as I know there are no pictures of the oldest two sisters, Maria and Elizabeth that died so young

Charlotte

Emily, Charlotte [Branwell-erased] and Anne in a portrait by Branwell

Haworth Parsonage [Charlotte in the distance they think]
Click here for a video about the Parsonage

Emily's portrait of her dog, Keeper

Charlotte's portrait of Anne's dog Flossy
More links!  Here is a link to the posts for Anne Bronte's novel, Agnes Grey.  The 1st book group selection to have an entry on this blog, 2 years ago this month.  Here is a snippet from that blog that applies to the Brontes, not just Anne and Agnes Grey.

For those of you wanting to read a bit more about Anne and her sisters' lives you can visit the sites listed here.
You can find some odd and cool things too.
Here is a pretend Bronte sisters power dolls ad that I cannot over sell:  


With so much to read and discover about Charlotte and her family and their writings it seems like maybe only a distraction to bring up the movies too, but there are a LOT of movies based on Jane Eyre.  As many of you know, I have a couple pet peeves about the movie adaptations.
One is that Rochester is never dark, wild and broody enough.  At best he comes across as a bit soft with fits of mania.
Some samples:

He's one of the better ones but did a WAY better job as Mr Markham in Anne's Tenent of Wildfell Hall (below)

 

I've long believed that Hugh Jackman is one of few actors who could properly pull off the range of emotions that Rochester displays without looking like a total nut.

He could even play opposite his Xmen costar Rogue who played young Jane (1996 version I think).

I still believe he'd be the best Rochester, but the most recent version chose another of the X-men to fill the role and he does a surprisingly good job.  So you get Magneto

instead of Wolverine,

but I was pleasantly surprised.

Also the FEEL of this movie, the slow-moving intensity of it does FEEL like the book.
[Spoiler alert]  My second pet peeve is that the climax of the book is when Jane is about to accept St John's proposal.  At first she's fairly appalled by the idea, but she begins to believe that he may be right and that perhaps it is God's will for her to marry him and be a missionary and she's just. about. to. say. 'yes' when she's saved by that voice calling her from across the moor.  EVERY movie (most recent one excepted, I think) butchers this, some leave it out entirely and it all makes for a much weaker story.  Weirdly I can't recall how they dealt with this in the newest one.  I just remember that they did a pretty good job with casting Rochester and Jane and the FEEL, again, I've never seen one that felt so much like reading the book.  I should watch it again, huh?
First I've got to finish re-reading the book.  Been too sick this last week to even read, much.  Watched like 20 episodes of the Cosby Show though.  Anywho . . .back to the book

Here are some discussion questions to think over (these are a selection from Penguin Classics and Random House and misc websites.)  You don't have to read them all, but I did narrow down a LOT.

JANE

1. Throughout the novel, questions of identity are raised. From her identity as an orphan and stranger in the hostile environment of Gateshead Hall to that of a ward of the church at Lowood; from her being a possible wife of Rochester, then of St. John, to being the cousin of Diana and Mary, Jane is constantly in transition. Trace these changes in identity and how they affect Jane's view of herself and the world around her. Describe the final discovery of her identity that becomes apparent in the last chapter of the novel and the events that made that discovery possible.
2. In what ways, and for what reasons, is Jane portrayed as an outsider?
3. Brontë populates the novel with many female characters roughly the same age as Jane—Georgiana and Eliza Reed, Helen Burns, Blanche Ingram, Mary and Diana Rivers, and Rosamund Oliver. How do comparisons with these characters shape the reader's understanding of Jane's character?
4. Is Jane’s ethical sense innate? Is she born knowing right from wrong, or does she learn the difference?
5. Why does Rochester like to describe Jane as some kind of supernatural creature – an elf, a fairy, a sprite, etc.? Does she have an "elfin" feel to the reader, or is he just making fun of her?
6. What would happen to the story if Jane were beautiful instead of plain? Would it matter?
7. Though possessing an inner strength that sustains her during the most difficult times, Jane also relies on the love and support of those around her. How does her friendship with Helen Burns ease Jane's transition to Lowood and inspire her intellectual achievement? Is the depth of their relationship fully realized in the film? How does Mrs. Fairfax's welcome of Jane at Thornfield contrast with the treatment she receives at Gateshead? What role do Diana and Mary Rivers play in restoring Jane's will to live after she abandons her post at Thornfield? What does Jane mean when she tells St. John that, though she has always known herself, Mr. Rochester was the first to recognize her?

ROCHESTER, ST. JOHN AND RELIGION

1. What does St. John feel for Jane? Why does Jane end her story with his prayer?
2. Jane asserts her equality to Rochester (p. 284), and St. John (p. 452). What does Jane mean by equality, and why is it so important to her?
3. In Jane Eyre, nothing can better show a man's moral worth than the way in which he treats the women in his life. How is Rochester's character reflected in the way he treats Jane, Adele, Bertha Mason, and Miss Ingram, and in his reported treatment of Celine Varens? How is St. John's character reflected in the way he treats Jane, Miss Oliver, and Diana and Mary? Why does this serve as such a good gauge of a man's morality and worth? What other relationships serve similar functions in the novel?
4. Throughout the novel, Charlotte Brontë uses biblical quotes and religious references. From the church-supported school she attended that was run by Mr. Brocklehurst to the offer of marriage she receives from St. John, she is surrounded by aspects of Christianity. How does this influence her throughout her development? How do her views of God and Christianity change from her days as a young girl to the end of the novel? How is religion depicted in the novel, positively or negatively?
5. Some movie adaptations all but eliminate the chapters with St. John, or at least the romance with him.  Are they essential?

JANE AND ROCHESTER

1. When Jane hears Rochester's voice calling while he is miles away, she says the phenomenon "is the work of nature" (p. 467). What does she mean by this? What are we intended to conclude about the meaning of this experience?
2. What is the balance of power between Jane and Rochester when they marry? Does this balance change from the beginning of the marriage to the time ten years later that Jane describes at the end of the novel (p. 500-501)?
3. Consider Jane and Rochester's relationship: What do they have in common; How do they establish a relationship; Is their relationship plausible?
4. If Jane and Rochester are "akin," then what is their "kind"? What do they actually share, and what made them similar in the first place?
5. Many critics have faulted Brontë for blinding and crippling Rochester.  Why do you think she did it?
6. Even though Rochester is often described as physically unattractive and bullying, and Jane, as plain, the romance between the two is one of the greatest in literary history.   Why?
7. "Reader, I married him...": Does Jane Eyre have a happy ending?  What does the novel conclude with the death of St. John rather than with Jane's and Rochester's marriage?

AUTHORSHIP

1. Upon publication, great speculation arose concerning the identity of the author of Jane Eyre, known only by the pen name Currer Bell. Questions as to the sex of the author were raised, and many critics said that they believed it to be the work of a man. One critic of her time said, "A book more unfeminine, both in its excellence and defects, it would be hard to find in the annals of female authorship. Throughout there is masculine power, breadth and shrewdness, combined with masculine hardness, coarseness, and freedom of expression." Another critic of the day, Elizabeth Rigby, said that if it was the product of a female pen, then it was the writing of a woman "unsexed." Why was there such importance placed on the sex of the author and why was it questioned so readily? What does it mean that people believed it to be the product of a man rather than of a woman?

MISC

1. Does the reader feel sorry for Bertha Mason? Does Rochester treat her fairly? Does she seem as bad as he suggests?