Chapter 1:
This chapter's main message was to figure out your biggest weaknesses, then take those weaknesses and find your greatest advantages. Gladwell first showed us this by using Vivek Randivé and his daughter’s Junior High basketball team. Randivé realized their greatest weakness was lack of experience. Realizing this weakness, Randivé decided to institute a full court press because they don’t need to have a background in basketball to to play tough defense. Usually teams run a full court press when the clock starts ticking down from a minute in the last quarter of the game. Randivé decided to institute that technique throughout the whole game. This was not seen often within the girls junior league, but that was also why it ended up being so successful. Seasoned coaches who played Randivé’s team were bewildered on why they were defeated by such a bad team. The reason why the underdogs won game after game was because what they did was so innovated in going outside the strategical norms. This is like how David used an unconventional method to defeat the giant.
Chapter 2:
Chapter two analyzes the inverted U-curve (upside down parabola) to describe the correlation between having too much of something and not having enough. Gladwell connects this theory to class sizes. Schools all around the United States brag about smaller class sizes, claiming that it allows for more student-teacher interaction. That may be the case, but many disadvantages arise from this situation as well. When there is less students in a classroom, there tends to be less discussion due to the lack of diversity. This can also go the other way. When there are too many students in a classroom there seems to be too much student to student interaction, causing a less affective learning environment. Wealth can also be described using an inverted U-Curve. Although many would have to disagree that too much wealth is a bad thing, in reality, once a person hits somewhere around $74,000 yearly income, they tend to be just as happy as people who make millions of dollars a year. Studies say that raising children when you are wealthy is extremely hard because once scarcity is eliminated, values diminish as well.That $74,000 yearly income tends to be the tipping point, so if you make less of that you may become less happy.
Chapter 3:
Chapter three starts out by talking about French Impressionist painters. One hundred and fifty years ago, Paris was the center of art culture in France. Back then, every artist had one goal: get into the Salon, which was a gallery for all the greatest art within France.There was one problem, the Salon forced artists to conform to what the Salon believed was real art (i.e. young men at war and fair maidens under trees). The artists were forced to become the little fish in the big pond. It got to the point where some artists got sick of conforming and decided to create there own Salon with paintings that probably wouldn’t have made it into the Salon. This idea brought us to a more relatable, modern situation. Caroline Sachs, an above-average high schooler, was trying to decide which college to attend, University of Maryland or Brown University. The challenge of picking which school she should go to was most difficult. The majority of students wouldn’t even think twice about it because attending the school with a better reputation would look better on a job application, right? No. The problem with the students who chose the better school is that they do not realize is they will be among other students who were valedictorians and 4.0 scholars, immediately making her a little fish in this big sea. By choosing this, Caroline becomes an average student, which was a completely new concept for her. In the end, the decision she made ended up causing her to drop her intended major because it was too difficult and pick up a new one. This major was less appealing to her, and was not her passion. Now don’t you wonder what would have happened if she would have chose to be a big fish in a little pond? So does she.
Chapter 4:
Chapter four starts out by explaining the effects of dyslexia on a person. Dyslexia is the inability to read and comprehend text. When we think dyslexia, we immediately cast the victim as the underdog in most situations. The reason why we do so is because we think in order to be successful in this competitive world, you have to be able to do everything better than your competitor does. When in reality you do not have to. David Boies, a world renowned lawyer, had dyslexia. Yes, a world famous lawyer has dyslexia, but he realized his weakness and made it his strength. Beginning at a young age, Boies realized he had a hard time reading, but instead of giving up, he tried harder. Boies would listen carefully and contently as someone spoke and his memory became a formidable instrument. This was Boies’ greatest strength: his ability to listen and keep everything he heard in his memory. Boies and many other dyslexics were not always successful at doing so. For example, Gary Cohn had discovered that he failed more than he succeeded. Gary realized that accepting the chance of failure made his life a whole lot easier, and sometimes more exciting. At a young age, he made a fateful decision to jump in a cab with a stock broker, who happened to be very high up in the ranks, and within an hour he was able to manipulate this man into believing that he was a successful option trader. The man bit the bait hook line and sinker, landing him a job and setting him up for a future in stock trading. Sometimes the things learned out of necessity are more powerful than the things that come easy.
Chapter 5:
Chapter five is all about how tragic events can often lead to success because the victim learns to persevere. Contrary to the German’s prediction during the Blitz in World War II against London, good things can come from the bad. According to studies, there are three kinds of outcomes that can come from bombings, which can also be applied to other devastating events. The first is direct hits; those affected die. The second is near misses; those affected buckle under shock and disbelief. The third is remote misses; those affected rejoice because they weren’t “hit.” These people actually gain confidence and feel invincible. Emil “Jay” Freireich, a man classified under a remote miss, and his family suffered through The Great Depression, causing his father to commit suicide, his mother to slave in a sweatshop for eighteen hours a day and his brother and him to fend for themselves. Channeling his agony and loneliness, Jay set out to accomplish his dream of becoming a doctor. Jay had a bitter temper and and no sense of sympathy for his patients and their families. Working on the leukemia floor at the National Cancer Institute outside of Washington, D.C., Jay pushed for medical methods that were unheard of and seemingly dangerous. From his stern and unconventional approach, Jay developed a successful treatment for childhood leukemia. As Gladwell so geniusly states, “It is possible to emerge from even the darkest hell healed and restored.”
Chapter 6:
Who would have known that one picture could spark something so huge? A picture was taken during a protest involving African American students from all around the Birmingham, Alabama area in 1963. This famous image is of one of the student protesters being attacked by a police force’s german sheppard. The teenager seems to be standing there, calm faced as though saying, “Take me, here I am.” This picture would have not been taken or spurred a revolt if it hadn’t been for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his companions in the civil rights movement. Dr. King began his journey in Albany, Georgia, where he had been the underdog. It was not the first time King had been the underdog. Every African American of that time had been forced to be the underdog in almost every aspect of their lives. This gave them a leg up when it came to fighting for equal rights; they knew they had nothing to lose, and everything to gain. There is a man by the name of Wyatt Tee Walker, a much more radical version of Dr. King, who used unconventional methods in order to get his point across. Walker was often compared to Brer Rabbit. Brer Rabbit was a character in African American culture who used his wits to get out of sticky situations. He wasn’t a trickster by choice, but by necessity. Walker often made things seem like something else, when they really weren’t. Often Walker would poke fun of Eugene Connor, trying to get himself thrown into the “briar patch” which would draw sympathy for the African Americans being discriminated against in the South. One example was when Walker said that the African Americans were going to march in the city. Not many showed up to march, but as Walker delayed the march, many more came out to watch. A mass number of spectators resulted in the miscalculation of true marchers by a local newspaper. Walker also used African American school children to draw sympathy from the public. He sent them out to a local Baptist church instead of going to school. As they grew in numbers, Eugene “Bull” Connor, the city’s public safety commissioner, used powerful firehoses to keep the crowd at bay, and on the other side, he sent out his German Shepherd K-9 units, where the famed photo at the bottom of the page was then taken.Walker and the civil rights movement leaders used this to portray police brutality and draw sympathy towards their movement. Nobody would have thought that it was okay to use school children against the city’s officials, but Walker used what he had, and made tremendous strides in the civil rights movement in Birmingham, which was at the time the most “racially divided city in America.” People knew how tough African Americans had it in Birmingham and they remarked, “Jesus said He’d go as far as Memphis,” meaning that everything else down South was God-forsaken and hopeless for the civil rights movement. Walker did meet with success using unconventional methods to become the Brer Rabbit-outsmart the antagonist- and the civil rights movement continued to flourish, even in the cruelest of places.
Chapter 7:
Rosemary Lawlor, an Irish Catholic, survived as a teenage mother during the Troubles in Northern Ireland between the Catholics and Protestants. The British army was called in to protect the citizens; however, the Brits turned on Ireland and the citizens became disobedient. She fought alongside many other citizens in an act to regain independence. As a result of stupidity and brutality among the government, a revolution arose. This behavior is linked to the “principle of legitimacy,” which is based off of three things: “First of all, people who are asked to obey authority have to feel like they have a voice- that if they speak up, they will be heard. Second, the law has to be predictable. There is to be a reasonable expectation that the rules tomorrow are going to be roughly the same as the rules today. And third, the authority has to be fair. It can’t treat one group differently from another.” How you punish is as important, if not more important, than the act of punishing itself. On the other end of the spectrum, Joanne Jaffe, head of the city’s Housing Bureau in Brownsville, New York found that showing juveniles love and sympathy lead the adolescents to make better choices. Unlike other authoritative figures whom are depicted as the enemy, Jaffe showed the teenagers the opposite is true. In order to establish legitimacy, authority figures need to do hundreds of little things to show their respect.
Chapter 8:
Chapter eight is unlike the others. This chapter starts out by telling us about Mike Reynolds’s daughter Kimber. Kimber is a student at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles. She grew up in Fresno, California. She came home one weekend in June of 1992, and little did she know it would be her last weekend alive. Kimber was jumped by two men after going on a date at a local cafe. She willingly gave up her purse but was shot by one of the men. Later that night Kimber died while holding her dad's hand. He promised his daughter one thing while she laid upon her death bed, he said “I'm going to do everything in my power to try and prevent this from happening to anybody else.” He did just that. That week, he held meetings in his backyard full of people he believed would make a difference. These men and women decided upon one thing: the penalties associated with breaking the law were to low. So they came up with the three strike law, which meant that if someone is convicted of a second serious or criminal offense, he would have to serve twice the sentence currently on the books. Then if a third offense was made by the same person, the person being charged had to spend a minimum of 25 years to life in jail. Crime dropped by 36.6 percent after this law was put into the books. So the question remains: did he do everything that he could? Yes, Mike did, but it also caused some major repercussions. Think of it like this, if a guy goes through a stage in his life and racks up two offenses, then he turns his life around completely, but slips up one day and steals a piece of pizza from someone. The deadly pizza stealer is sent to jail for 25 years, see the flaw in this law? In the book they describe it also as an inverted U-Curve because they believe the benefits of sending these men to prison is far outweighed by the negatives. Also many lawmakers believe that the men which we are trying to affect and send to prison, also tend to care less about the repercussions of what they have done but focus more on the benefits of the crime they break. There minds are much different from ours. The man who killed Mike Reynolds’s daughter later told police that he shot Kimber just because she looked at him wrong. Wilma Dirksen had lost her daughter in a very similar situation. Her daughter was abducted, tortured, and found a month later in a barn outside of town. Do you think she acted the same way as Mike did? No she did not, because she was warned of the consequences she might face if she allowed her daughters death to mentally eat her alive. Some would say the way she reacted was weird, not wanting to revolt but she was born into a community where they believed in forgiving then forgetting. in the end a man employs the full power of the state in his grief and ends up plunging his government into a fruitless and costly experiment. A woman who walks away from the promise of power finds strength to forgive-- and saves her friendship, her marriage, and her sanity.
Chapter 9:
This chapter begins in June of 1940 when France fell to Germany. Germany allowed the French to set up a government in the city of Vichy. It was headed by Philippe Petain, who complied with all Germanys orders, by finding and sending all jews to internment camps, and dozens of other authoritarian steps. But not all surrounding cities followed these steps, the main city in which this occurred was Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. It all began with one pastor Andre Trochme, he rebelled against anything the inner state was enforcing upon them. He started by telling all who listened to his service to not listen or obey anything that does not follow the orders of the gospel, which included going against the Germans thoughts on Jews. As Petain was going around looking for all the Jewish men and women, Trocme was taking in them for safety and security. This agitated Petain, he counteracts Trochme by sending Lamirand throughout the mountains teaching obedience to towns people all around the mountain ranges. When Lamirand reaches Le Chambon hes met by a town full of anger and hate for the subjects he is trying to teach or enforce. During this meeting a group of students walked up to Lamirand and presented him a letter. The main message of this letter was, “We have Jews, you’re not getting them”. For years the French people have had to hide, and create false documents in order to evade German forces. Giving them the upper leg on all of Pettains pitiful actions. Trochme was not backing down. This man was once arrested and told he would be set free if he signed a paper saying he would follow all the rules of the government, Trochme being the stubborn man he is decides not to sign it, risking his own life and freedom. You may wonder where he got his stubbornness from. Well when Trochme was ten he and his parents were headed towards their house in the country, they got in an accident. That day he saw his mom lay lifeless in the middle of the road. His life has never been the same. He told people “Pine trees do not re generate their tops. They stay twisted, crippled.” he also says those trees do one other thing. “They grow in thickness, perhaps, and that is what I am doing”.
This chapter's main message was to figure out your biggest weaknesses, then take those weaknesses and find your greatest advantages. Gladwell first showed us this by using Vivek Randivé and his daughter’s Junior High basketball team. Randivé realized their greatest weakness was lack of experience. Realizing this weakness, Randivé decided to institute a full court press because they don’t need to have a background in basketball to to play tough defense. Usually teams run a full court press when the clock starts ticking down from a minute in the last quarter of the game. Randivé decided to institute that technique throughout the whole game. This was not seen often within the girls junior league, but that was also why it ended up being so successful. Seasoned coaches who played Randivé’s team were bewildered on why they were defeated by such a bad team. The reason why the underdogs won game after game was because what they did was so innovated in going outside the strategical norms. This is like how David used an unconventional method to defeat the giant.
Chapter 2:
Chapter two analyzes the inverted U-curve (upside down parabola) to describe the correlation between having too much of something and not having enough. Gladwell connects this theory to class sizes. Schools all around the United States brag about smaller class sizes, claiming that it allows for more student-teacher interaction. That may be the case, but many disadvantages arise from this situation as well. When there is less students in a classroom, there tends to be less discussion due to the lack of diversity. This can also go the other way. When there are too many students in a classroom there seems to be too much student to student interaction, causing a less affective learning environment. Wealth can also be described using an inverted U-Curve. Although many would have to disagree that too much wealth is a bad thing, in reality, once a person hits somewhere around $74,000 yearly income, they tend to be just as happy as people who make millions of dollars a year. Studies say that raising children when you are wealthy is extremely hard because once scarcity is eliminated, values diminish as well.That $74,000 yearly income tends to be the tipping point, so if you make less of that you may become less happy.
Chapter 3:
Chapter three starts out by talking about French Impressionist painters. One hundred and fifty years ago, Paris was the center of art culture in France. Back then, every artist had one goal: get into the Salon, which was a gallery for all the greatest art within France.There was one problem, the Salon forced artists to conform to what the Salon believed was real art (i.e. young men at war and fair maidens under trees). The artists were forced to become the little fish in the big pond. It got to the point where some artists got sick of conforming and decided to create there own Salon with paintings that probably wouldn’t have made it into the Salon. This idea brought us to a more relatable, modern situation. Caroline Sachs, an above-average high schooler, was trying to decide which college to attend, University of Maryland or Brown University. The challenge of picking which school she should go to was most difficult. The majority of students wouldn’t even think twice about it because attending the school with a better reputation would look better on a job application, right? No. The problem with the students who chose the better school is that they do not realize is they will be among other students who were valedictorians and 4.0 scholars, immediately making her a little fish in this big sea. By choosing this, Caroline becomes an average student, which was a completely new concept for her. In the end, the decision she made ended up causing her to drop her intended major because it was too difficult and pick up a new one. This major was less appealing to her, and was not her passion. Now don’t you wonder what would have happened if she would have chose to be a big fish in a little pond? So does she.
Chapter 4:
Chapter four starts out by explaining the effects of dyslexia on a person. Dyslexia is the inability to read and comprehend text. When we think dyslexia, we immediately cast the victim as the underdog in most situations. The reason why we do so is because we think in order to be successful in this competitive world, you have to be able to do everything better than your competitor does. When in reality you do not have to. David Boies, a world renowned lawyer, had dyslexia. Yes, a world famous lawyer has dyslexia, but he realized his weakness and made it his strength. Beginning at a young age, Boies realized he had a hard time reading, but instead of giving up, he tried harder. Boies would listen carefully and contently as someone spoke and his memory became a formidable instrument. This was Boies’ greatest strength: his ability to listen and keep everything he heard in his memory. Boies and many other dyslexics were not always successful at doing so. For example, Gary Cohn had discovered that he failed more than he succeeded. Gary realized that accepting the chance of failure made his life a whole lot easier, and sometimes more exciting. At a young age, he made a fateful decision to jump in a cab with a stock broker, who happened to be very high up in the ranks, and within an hour he was able to manipulate this man into believing that he was a successful option trader. The man bit the bait hook line and sinker, landing him a job and setting him up for a future in stock trading. Sometimes the things learned out of necessity are more powerful than the things that come easy.
Chapter 5:
Chapter five is all about how tragic events can often lead to success because the victim learns to persevere. Contrary to the German’s prediction during the Blitz in World War II against London, good things can come from the bad. According to studies, there are three kinds of outcomes that can come from bombings, which can also be applied to other devastating events. The first is direct hits; those affected die. The second is near misses; those affected buckle under shock and disbelief. The third is remote misses; those affected rejoice because they weren’t “hit.” These people actually gain confidence and feel invincible. Emil “Jay” Freireich, a man classified under a remote miss, and his family suffered through The Great Depression, causing his father to commit suicide, his mother to slave in a sweatshop for eighteen hours a day and his brother and him to fend for themselves. Channeling his agony and loneliness, Jay set out to accomplish his dream of becoming a doctor. Jay had a bitter temper and and no sense of sympathy for his patients and their families. Working on the leukemia floor at the National Cancer Institute outside of Washington, D.C., Jay pushed for medical methods that were unheard of and seemingly dangerous. From his stern and unconventional approach, Jay developed a successful treatment for childhood leukemia. As Gladwell so geniusly states, “It is possible to emerge from even the darkest hell healed and restored.”
Chapter 6:
Who would have known that one picture could spark something so huge? A picture was taken during a protest involving African American students from all around the Birmingham, Alabama area in 1963. This famous image is of one of the student protesters being attacked by a police force’s german sheppard. The teenager seems to be standing there, calm faced as though saying, “Take me, here I am.” This picture would have not been taken or spurred a revolt if it hadn’t been for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his companions in the civil rights movement. Dr. King began his journey in Albany, Georgia, where he had been the underdog. It was not the first time King had been the underdog. Every African American of that time had been forced to be the underdog in almost every aspect of their lives. This gave them a leg up when it came to fighting for equal rights; they knew they had nothing to lose, and everything to gain. There is a man by the name of Wyatt Tee Walker, a much more radical version of Dr. King, who used unconventional methods in order to get his point across. Walker was often compared to Brer Rabbit. Brer Rabbit was a character in African American culture who used his wits to get out of sticky situations. He wasn’t a trickster by choice, but by necessity. Walker often made things seem like something else, when they really weren’t. Often Walker would poke fun of Eugene Connor, trying to get himself thrown into the “briar patch” which would draw sympathy for the African Americans being discriminated against in the South. One example was when Walker said that the African Americans were going to march in the city. Not many showed up to march, but as Walker delayed the march, many more came out to watch. A mass number of spectators resulted in the miscalculation of true marchers by a local newspaper. Walker also used African American school children to draw sympathy from the public. He sent them out to a local Baptist church instead of going to school. As they grew in numbers, Eugene “Bull” Connor, the city’s public safety commissioner, used powerful firehoses to keep the crowd at bay, and on the other side, he sent out his German Shepherd K-9 units, where the famed photo at the bottom of the page was then taken.Walker and the civil rights movement leaders used this to portray police brutality and draw sympathy towards their movement. Nobody would have thought that it was okay to use school children against the city’s officials, but Walker used what he had, and made tremendous strides in the civil rights movement in Birmingham, which was at the time the most “racially divided city in America.” People knew how tough African Americans had it in Birmingham and they remarked, “Jesus said He’d go as far as Memphis,” meaning that everything else down South was God-forsaken and hopeless for the civil rights movement. Walker did meet with success using unconventional methods to become the Brer Rabbit-outsmart the antagonist- and the civil rights movement continued to flourish, even in the cruelest of places.
Chapter 7:
Rosemary Lawlor, an Irish Catholic, survived as a teenage mother during the Troubles in Northern Ireland between the Catholics and Protestants. The British army was called in to protect the citizens; however, the Brits turned on Ireland and the citizens became disobedient. She fought alongside many other citizens in an act to regain independence. As a result of stupidity and brutality among the government, a revolution arose. This behavior is linked to the “principle of legitimacy,” which is based off of three things: “First of all, people who are asked to obey authority have to feel like they have a voice- that if they speak up, they will be heard. Second, the law has to be predictable. There is to be a reasonable expectation that the rules tomorrow are going to be roughly the same as the rules today. And third, the authority has to be fair. It can’t treat one group differently from another.” How you punish is as important, if not more important, than the act of punishing itself. On the other end of the spectrum, Joanne Jaffe, head of the city’s Housing Bureau in Brownsville, New York found that showing juveniles love and sympathy lead the adolescents to make better choices. Unlike other authoritative figures whom are depicted as the enemy, Jaffe showed the teenagers the opposite is true. In order to establish legitimacy, authority figures need to do hundreds of little things to show their respect.
Chapter 8:
Chapter eight is unlike the others. This chapter starts out by telling us about Mike Reynolds’s daughter Kimber. Kimber is a student at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles. She grew up in Fresno, California. She came home one weekend in June of 1992, and little did she know it would be her last weekend alive. Kimber was jumped by two men after going on a date at a local cafe. She willingly gave up her purse but was shot by one of the men. Later that night Kimber died while holding her dad's hand. He promised his daughter one thing while she laid upon her death bed, he said “I'm going to do everything in my power to try and prevent this from happening to anybody else.” He did just that. That week, he held meetings in his backyard full of people he believed would make a difference. These men and women decided upon one thing: the penalties associated with breaking the law were to low. So they came up with the three strike law, which meant that if someone is convicted of a second serious or criminal offense, he would have to serve twice the sentence currently on the books. Then if a third offense was made by the same person, the person being charged had to spend a minimum of 25 years to life in jail. Crime dropped by 36.6 percent after this law was put into the books. So the question remains: did he do everything that he could? Yes, Mike did, but it also caused some major repercussions. Think of it like this, if a guy goes through a stage in his life and racks up two offenses, then he turns his life around completely, but slips up one day and steals a piece of pizza from someone. The deadly pizza stealer is sent to jail for 25 years, see the flaw in this law? In the book they describe it also as an inverted U-Curve because they believe the benefits of sending these men to prison is far outweighed by the negatives. Also many lawmakers believe that the men which we are trying to affect and send to prison, also tend to care less about the repercussions of what they have done but focus more on the benefits of the crime they break. There minds are much different from ours. The man who killed Mike Reynolds’s daughter later told police that he shot Kimber just because she looked at him wrong. Wilma Dirksen had lost her daughter in a very similar situation. Her daughter was abducted, tortured, and found a month later in a barn outside of town. Do you think she acted the same way as Mike did? No she did not, because she was warned of the consequences she might face if she allowed her daughters death to mentally eat her alive. Some would say the way she reacted was weird, not wanting to revolt but she was born into a community where they believed in forgiving then forgetting. in the end a man employs the full power of the state in his grief and ends up plunging his government into a fruitless and costly experiment. A woman who walks away from the promise of power finds strength to forgive-- and saves her friendship, her marriage, and her sanity.
Chapter 9:
This chapter begins in June of 1940 when France fell to Germany. Germany allowed the French to set up a government in the city of Vichy. It was headed by Philippe Petain, who complied with all Germanys orders, by finding and sending all jews to internment camps, and dozens of other authoritarian steps. But not all surrounding cities followed these steps, the main city in which this occurred was Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. It all began with one pastor Andre Trochme, he rebelled against anything the inner state was enforcing upon them. He started by telling all who listened to his service to not listen or obey anything that does not follow the orders of the gospel, which included going against the Germans thoughts on Jews. As Petain was going around looking for all the Jewish men and women, Trocme was taking in them for safety and security. This agitated Petain, he counteracts Trochme by sending Lamirand throughout the mountains teaching obedience to towns people all around the mountain ranges. When Lamirand reaches Le Chambon hes met by a town full of anger and hate for the subjects he is trying to teach or enforce. During this meeting a group of students walked up to Lamirand and presented him a letter. The main message of this letter was, “We have Jews, you’re not getting them”. For years the French people have had to hide, and create false documents in order to evade German forces. Giving them the upper leg on all of Pettains pitiful actions. Trochme was not backing down. This man was once arrested and told he would be set free if he signed a paper saying he would follow all the rules of the government, Trochme being the stubborn man he is decides not to sign it, risking his own life and freedom. You may wonder where he got his stubbornness from. Well when Trochme was ten he and his parents were headed towards their house in the country, they got in an accident. That day he saw his mom lay lifeless in the middle of the road. His life has never been the same. He told people “Pine trees do not re generate their tops. They stay twisted, crippled.” he also says those trees do one other thing. “They grow in thickness, perhaps, and that is what I am doing”.