Born on October 18, 1951 in Port Huron, Michigan, University of California, Berkeley graduate Terry McMillan‘s life-long interest in books and storytelling led her to publish her first book, Mama, in 1987 and her follow-up effort, Disappearing Acts, in 1989.
Her work is characterized by relatable female protagonists, received national attention in 1992 with her third novel, Waiting to Exhale, which remained on The New York Times bestseller list for 38 straight weeks. In 1995, Forest Whitaker directed a film version of Exhale starring Angela Bassett, Loretta Devine, Lela Rochon and Whitney Houston. In 1998, another of McMillan’s novels, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, was made into a successful movie starring Angela Bassett and Taye Diggs. McMillan’s novel Disappearing Acts was subsequently produced as a feature on HBO, starring Wesley Snipes and Sanaa Lathan. She also wrote the bestseller A Day Late and a Dollar Short, soon to be adapted into a Lifetime movie starring Whoopi Goldberg. The Interruption of Everything was published on July 19, 2005. Getting to Happy, the long-awaited sequel to Waiting to Exhale, was published on September 7, 2010, and her latest novel, Who Asked You? was recently published this fall. To learn more about McMillan and her work, visit her website, terrymcmillan.com or follow her on Twitter at @MsTerryMcMillan.
article by Lori Lakin Hutcherson
What if we lived in a world where the weak were really strong, and all of our disadvantages could easily become advantages? In his new book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, best-selling writer Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers) tells us we’re already living in that kind of world. Even something as debilitating as
“The one trait in a lot of dyslexic people I know is that by the time we got out of college, our ability to deal with failure was very highly developed,” says Gary Cohn, a man of humble origins whose bold decisions take him to the top of the U.S. financial industry. “I wouldn’t be where I am today without my dyslexia.”
Gladwell, a staff writer at the New Yorker, has sold a ton of books explaining seemingly counterintuitive and complex arguments about psychology and the social sciences to a mass audience. In David and Goliath his mission is to show us how our thinking about power, influence and success is often misguided and wrong. “We have, I think, a very rigid and limited definition of what an advantage is,” Gladwell writes. “When we see the giant, why do we automatically assume the battle is his for the winning?”
As always, Gladwell populates his pages with insights illustrated by one memorable character study and anecdote after another. He can be an efficient and persuasive storyteller, and in this book his cast of “Davids” include French Impressionist painters, undersized basketball players and civil-rights marchers; his “Goliaths” include the French art establishment, basketball traditionalists and segregationist police chiefs.
