the bomber mafia by malcolm gladwell welcome back to my channel my name is samuel and i want to make self growth normal if you want to make self growth normal because i don't want to do it alone then make sure to smash that like button for the youtube algorithm guys first i want to apologize i feel like recently i've been putting out maybe like one review a week at the most something tells me i'm gonna be saying stuff like this the further i get into this youtube channel stuff i'm moving through a lot not going
through a lot i'm trying to get promoted from where i'm at at work to sales my girlfriend and i are we're trying to get into a different uh we're trying to get into a different house maybe you have something like this you find yourself trying to move into a different lifestyle area of of something and or multiple things in your life since moving here and since going into sales starting doing book reviews being with my girlfriend this is the next you know the next step for me if you want to comment below i'm very curious
i'm always curious about this stuff what the next step is for you or where you're at now please feel free to let me know i've just been studying a lot about different vehicles practicing lines and stuff like that looking at apartments but the fact is at the same time it could be i could be listening to an audiobook like anyway when i saw that malcolm gladwell put out a new book as always i was like malcolm gladwell put out a new book yes however a huge reason for this is always it's just that malcolm gladwell
books have this very everything you know is wrong about this topic and here's why nature to them so when i read that it was about how precision bombing can [ __ ] the enemy and make war less lethal i was like this guy is not really like a known historian what is going on sure this book does have that everything you know about everything is wrong and here's why nature to it but it's maybe not as prevalent as his other books you see precision bombing is a very specific concrete subject and gladwell was an author
i always thought to be like a specific and maybe maybe even concrete uh journalist as guilded as one not a guilded historian despite the name of his podcast revisionist history so i scratched my head and figured i'd check it out what do i have to lose right what can we learn from bomber mafia that's interesting that we can apply to our own lives and where does it stand in his bibliography compared to his other books is it actually good if you like it in his book would you like any of his others and why in
this review i'm gonna lay out my thoughts on this my thoughts on the chapters things that surprised me things that like like the wow moments i'm also gonna go over some standout quotes who i recommend this book to and what books to maybe check out next the author looked at his bookshelf one day and he realized how many history books he had accumulated over the over the years about war and how wars were more about precision bombing than anything else until this time he had written mainly about social psychology he gets plenty of books in
a subject before he plans to write about it himself now he finally found a way to write about war and i didn't know about his interest in war before he hasn't really talked that much about war in other books at all that i know of the bomber mafia is a case study about how dreams go awry and how when a new shiny idea drops down from the heavens it doesn't land softly it lands hard on the ground and shatters the stories in this book are not war stories although they do take place during wars i
was gonna say i don't know about that but actually that's a really good point it's about a dutch genius and his homemade computer a band of brothers in central alabama a british psychopath a pyrochemist basement set up in harvard there are five words you don't hear every day and it's all a story about the messiness of our intentions because we always forget the mess when we look back at it it's crazy in world war one and world war ii the author was interviewing historians and like survivors and stuff like that from the war and one
guy said that these soldiers would drop bombs and eventually they found out exactly how to hit exactly where they needed to going sometimes as fast as 500 miles an hour in the sky with the wind blowing at their faces as sometimes as high as 100 miles per hour at 20 000 feet in the air when the when the earth was tilting by the way spinning further the higher you are in the amount of time it takes you to drop the bomb from where you are to the ground people yelling at them so many distractions how
the hell do people do that this is like driving 70 miles an hour on the freeway and throwing a soda can in the trash bin on the side of the road i don't know why there would be his trash bin on the side of the road aren't there like laws against littering i mean i guess it wouldn't be littering if you're throwing into a trash can but maybe it depends on what state you're in but still how do you make that shock even the fastest nba players don't don't run at 70 miles an hour even
the fastest person in the world doesn't run at 70 miles an hour i don't think the fastest person in the world even runs half of 70 miles per hour and that's 70 miles per hour this is five this is what 500 by the way maybe if if you've seen my review of his previous book talking to strangers maybe you remember i mentioned that these there are these occasional sounds in the background these sometimes these quiet sometimes subtle keyboard or melodies that add to the suspense of certain moments in talking to strangers i don't remember exactly
what i thought about it but it's definitely just as dominant in this book i feel like it fits very very well i don't understand how but the samples of conferences and interviews and speeches and music they all really really seem to animate the stories in the audio version and if you're an auditory learner like i am even if you're not really a history buff if you checked out the audiobook i think you'd really appreciate it i much prefer learning about social psychology especially by a guy like gladwell but again this book did surprise me with
the with the topic at hand the precision bombing precision bombing really really gladwell really one of the unexpected uh pleasures of speaking with historians military historians is their irreverence toward their own institution richard muller a history teacher said i mean what is going on but there are 20th century men and they are on the front end of this incredible progression of material development and improvement and there's just this faith that they'll get there they don't quite know how they don't know where but they'll get there and it's not particularly unreasonable in their time and place
it's not unreasonable for them to have this kind of faith that they can get the right plane from the b9 to the b10 to the b12 to the b14 to the b17 to the b29 in about 10 years which is extraordinary the next chapter was about winston churchill and frederick what is it ironymen frederick lindemann but the next chapter is where malcolm gladwell introduces this this this super just badass general who he spends a lot of the rest of the book focusing on the story of the american general named curtis lemay listen to this brief
description of his background that gladwell had he joined the army out of college and his ascent through the air corps was breathtaking a captain by 33 then a major colonel and brigadier leader and by the age of 37 a major general lemay was a bulldog oversized square head hair parted triumphantly just to shade off to the middle a brilliant poker player a crack shot a mind that moves only forwards never sideways rationable imperturbable and incapable of self-doubt isn't this gangster i wanted to briefly showcase here malcolm gladwell's calculated yet somehow occasionally mercurial writing style who
thinks sideways gladwell seriously knows how to introduce a character anyway something around this time during the bombings of frankfurt were basically lots and lots and lots and lots of people were dying i heard at some point there was a 20 survival rate gladwell introduced another guy named haywood hensel who compared to lemay as like a commander or an executor executor is that a word a person or institution appointed by a tested or to carry out the terms of their will a person who produces something or puts something into effect produces something or puts something into
effect that definitely definitely definitely describes lemay but hansel kind of seemed like a joke compared to lemay as an executor the way gladwell described him from playing the man on the flying trapeze a song which may as well have totally slapped at the time to when they failed and lose and lost a bunch of people saying i'm optimistic we'll do this like like when they just would not react like that at all pencils like we're gonna learn from this and keep moving forward i get that it is a really good mindset to have but in
the military in world war ii i don't know compared to lemay he sounded like he would have been a much better kindergarten teacher then commanding officer what i really like about how gladwell introduced them was that he established this relativity for us and it kind of framed that around us kind of seeing how badass lemay was it almost makes you wonder what it would be like him what it would be like for him to be in service now with everything that's changed after the wars come to think of it i also kind of wonder how
henselt would have done things differently this was almost a century ago this was like 80 years ago or something there there's so much more they could do now there were also some obscured experiments going on gladwell said the scale of different experiments and projects we had going on at the time for the military for the sake of the military it was insane i mean they had americans working in corners quote-unquote shrouded in darkness missions launched that no one heard about and ideas being pursued in one place that contradicted ideas being pursued in another as they
said in the war the right hand of the government didn't always know what the left hand was doing the next chapter called it's all ashes all that and that and that here's what i wrote bombs and bombs so many bombs lemay just bombs and bombs maybe they're not so many bombs but the bombs there were so big such huge bombs this one bombing that in tokyo that lemay ordered had left between 90 and 100 000 people dead over one million people homeless and about 270 000 buildings were destroyed in tokyo and all this happened in
one night march 10th what was it march 10th march 9th 1945. the same summer i i guess lemay just spent a lot of that summer just randomly bombing parts of tokyo especially the parts that they bombed on march 10th 1945 it almost seems like lemay's biggest weakness is that he never celebrated or took a turn took a moment to be grateful or have grace for his victories and that was a huge difference between lemay and hansel it's like these are two people we need to find out how to learn the most we can from ultimately
the most impressive thing to me about this book was not just as always gladwell's skill level as a journalist or reporter because that seems to be ever sharpening at this point but his new company push can industries they really really seem to be pushing the envelope regarding production i mean the cinematic means by which this this production was put together added so much depth to it in my opinion without without drowning out the listening experience and to me that that that is as an audiobook listener that is really important maybe it's not something that's for
everyone but it almost makes me wonder if these people are on like the verge of an innovative breakthrough in what an audiobook is let alone can be and with the exception of his previous book talking to strangers this is not something that you can find in any of his other audiobooks any of them at all so i don't know it's a change that he's willing to make and i still hope that he does it in more books uh you know in the coming future being more about precision bombing than anything else it nonetheless has a
very different flavor to it whereas again his other books tend to be about social psychology the closest one i would compare to this is maybe david and goliath his other books again they tend to be about social psychology and how it can be used most in business settings this had more of a i was dreading using this guy's name since i love his work i always seem to mention it in gladwell reviews it had more of a robber green texture to it without the here's what you do you find out what their weaknesses are and
then you prey upon them or something like that no this is just here's what lemay did and i'm not gonna say how you can do it too because it's pretty insane and this is just an exciting retrospective gladwelian account of world war ii bombings it's not a playbook on modern warfare or anything quotes this is so air force all war is absurd for thousands of years humans have decided to settle our differences by obliterating each other software programmers have a beta version then a 1.0 then a 2.0 because they realize they can never get it
right the first time when a problem solver is finally free to act he will let nothing stand in his way it was the duration of war not the techniques of war that caused the most suffering direction one i recommend this book for anyone who wants to check out an accessible account on world war bombings direction two if you like this book you might like the 33 strategies of war by robert greene and the art of war by sun tzu and ego is the enemy by ryan holiday the bomber mafia by malcolm gladwell there's a link
in the description if you guys want to check out and read the reviews that and all the other books that i mentioned in this video if you want to check those out too if you guys buy anything through the links in the description then i get commission which helps me build this channel and keep making these videos and there any other books that you guys want me to check out and review please let me know in the comments below also let me know if you checked out this book and you liked it but hey make
sure to smash that like button subscribe if you haven't already because i don't get why people watch this far in my videos and they don't subscribe but if you have subscribed and you want to turn it up just a notch and turn on that notification bell to get a notification whenever i drop new videos that would mean the world to me thank you guys so much for watching i really appreciate it you can find me everywhere and i will see you then
