Outlier” is a scientific term describing things that lie outside normal experience. Malcolm Gladwell is interested in people he calls outliers — men and women so accomplished, so extraordinary, they puzzle the rest of us. His new book, a fascinating exploration of such people, grew out of his frustration with the usual explanations for them — “he’s really smart” or “she’s really ambitious.”

“People don’t rise from nothing,” writes Gladwell, a New Yorker staff writer and a former science writer for the Washington Post. “It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t.”

Gladwell’s previous books include The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (2000) and Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005), both best-sellers. The first studied the unexpected way ideas, trends and fads spread through the population, the second why split-second decisions often turn out to be better than more-informed choices.

In Outliers Gladwell argues that intelligence alone or drive alone doesn’t make the difference between success and failure but that culture, circumstance, timing, birth and luck all figure into the picture. Gladwell visited Chinese rice paddies, airplane cockpits, the rural South, law firms in Manhattan and inner-city classrooms to find support for his argument. He also analyzed the lives of successful people, including the Beatles and Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

Gates, for instance, acknowledged that wealthy, supportive parents and luck formed a big part of his success. He discovered computers at a private school in Seattle in 1968. Later, through a series of lucky breaks, he managed to spend hundreds of hours programming computers before dropping out of Harvard after his sophomore year to start his own software company.

Like most successful people, Gates is also smart, but high IQ isn’t enough. Gladwell tells the poignant story of Chris Langan, whose IQ of 195 is higher than Einstein’s and who has been called the smartest man in America. But instead of achieving the success his intelligence might predict, Langan lives on a “slightly tumbledown horse farm in northern Missouri, sitting on the back porch in jeans and a cutoff T-shirt.”

Unlike Gates, Langan had no family support as a child. His father disappeared before he was born, and he was raised in poverty. His mother’s second husband was murdered, and her third husband committed suicide. Unlike Gates and many other successful people, Langan “had to make his way alone, and no one, not even geniuses, ever makes it alone,” Gladwell writes.

One of the most interesting parts of the book looks at why a surprising number of powerful corporate lawyers in Manhattan have similar backgrounds. Gladwell investigates the unique culture and skills of Eastern European Jewish immigrants and convincingly explains their rise in the city, first in the garment business, then in the law.

“Their world — their culture and generation and family history — gave them the greatest of opportunities,” he writes.

But the most fascinating part of the book is Gladwell’s own family history, which he calls “A Jamaican Story.” It began in 1784 when William Ford moved from Ireland to Jamaica to run a coffee plantation. Shortly after his arrival, Ford bought a woman at a slave market. She became his concubine — and the author’s great-great-great grandmother.

The social structure of the West Indies differed significantly from that of the American South, and Gladwell’s ancestors in Jamaica had considerable status notwithstanding their color. What he calls “a culture of possibility” enabled people like Daisy Ford, his schoolteacher grandmother, to aspire to better things for her children. She pushed hard to arrange for her daughter — the author’s mother — to leave the island and get a university education in England and become a writer.

His mother, Gladwell writes, “taught me how to express myself; she taught me that there is beauty in saying something clearly and simply. She read every word of this book and tried to hold me to that standard. My grandmother Daisy, to whom Outliers is dedicated, gave my mother the gift of opportunity. My mother has done the same for me.”

The author of this provocative book is occasionally glib and sometimes comes across as belaboring the obvious. But he’s never dull, and his book is a pleasure to read.

Elizabeth Bennett is a freelance writer in Houston.