I didn't go to university
buy adalat Books are compressed experience: They open us up to other times and places and to other lives. In "David and Goliath," Malcolm Gladwell reintroduces us to people we thought we knew, and by showing them in the revealing light of his telling, we gain new and unexpected perspectives. What appears to be advantage may not be as it seems. Likewise disadvantage: Exceptional heights can be reached from low and adverse circumstance. Bill Bryson's "One Summer: America, 1927" could serve as an illustration of Mr. Gladwell's premise. Watching the famed lives of Charles Lindbergh, Babe Ruth and Calvin Coolidge reveals that what we think of as the felicitous rewards of success were not at all what these men experienced. In my favorite book of the year, "The Boys in the Boat," Daniel James Brown traces the life of Joe Rantz and other "boys" who won a gold medal in the 1936 Olympics in Hitler's Germany. From a heart-rending childhood, this man overcame the injuries to his soul to win and, thereafter, to live a full and abundant life. The more experience we gain from books like these, the more we are inclined to rethink our assumptions: in the words of Charles Krauthammer, to "view certainty with suspicion."