Gladwell is taking a lot of heat for biasing the examples he chooses in his books to make points that are often later shown to be somewhat tenuous. That may be the case, but he is a heck of a writer. He knows how to tell a compelling story and the conversations he sparks go on for years. Whatever harm that may come from the lack of rigorousness in his brand of pop-psychology is easily overshadowed by the positive cultural impact that comes from people giving serious consideration to his ideas an...

What an excellent storyteller. I love his mind. I was smiling a lot. It’s stimulating. These things are fun to think about.Not everything he says is irrefutable fact. Some of his information is anecdotal. But he raises good questions. I think what he says is true, even though opposite or different views may be true. Some topics were a little slow, but I was frequently delighted and fascinated.MY FAVORITE TOPICS:The story of David and GoliathLess talented basketball players can win using full cou...

This guy writes so well. He draws you in with beautifully crafted stories. Murnane says in one of his books that he regretted having told people that some of his books were works of fiction and some essays. I really believe that creativity is essential for both these writing tasks, and that because real art prefers to hide, there is a good argument to be had in believing that more creativity is asked for in the writing of non-fiction than in fiction.Not that this guy really hides his artifice. H...

David and Goliath opens, appropriately, with a discussion of the literal confrontation between David and Goliath, and how the conventional understanding that David was a massive underdog is precisely backwards. In fact, Goliath never stood a chance of defeating David (there are reasons). And Mr. Gladwell uses that story to lay out the two ideas he wants to examine. The first is that “the act of facing overwhelming odds produces greatness and beauty.” The second is that:[W]e consistently get thes...

I wrote about my Malcolm Gladwell ambivalence in my What the Dog Saw review. Reading Gladwell has become, for me, the literary equivalent of eating Cheetos or listening to Coldplay - I unequivocally enjoy the experience, but in a vaguely unsatisfying way and I wouldn't want anyone to catch me doing it. His rhetorical stock-in-trade is the reassessment of received wisdom about human behavior examined with respect to such organizing topics as trends, decision-making, success and, in this instance,...

As with everything Gladwell, this book is a fun and fast read that is not at all careful with its conclusions. It's not careful scholarship, but Gladwell doesn't claim it to me. In other words, he tells a story with great anecdotes and some data that doesn't always support the point he is making. However, I believe the point he is making in David and Goliath (that underdogs can have hidden strengths and that trials and tragedy can lead to strong character). The point is valid and the stories are...

I think everyone heard my jaw drop. Much like a born again who reads the bible for the first time, I have never been able to relate to a book as well as with David & Goliath.Disclosure: I'm a dyslexic who spent all of his youth struggling through school -- spending my lunches tirelessly improving my spelling while everyone else spent their lunch break improving their rest. Things turned out all right, I was one of the first dyslexics at my school to graduate with an International Baccalaureate d...

Now, there is a lot of skepticism about Gladwell and his research methods, but whether he self-selects his data or whatever, I think that the very nature of his writing indicates that his research isn't totally conclusive. So why bother reading him? Well, Gladwell, whether he's a legitimate social scientist(or whatever the term is) or not, is a pretty gifted writer. He has a knack for telling stories and presenting dry information, like statistics, in a compelling way. Plus, his theories are alw...

I've never hidden my stigmatized identity as an academic social scientist who loves Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell's books are routinely criticized by folks in my field for relying too heavily on anecdotes, conveniently selecting and interpreting supportive scientific studies, and imprecision/ overgeneralization. These points are valid, but I don't see them as damning. Gladwell isn't a scientist, and he's not writing textbooks. Ideally, he helps spark people's interest in research and makes them wan...

I'm a Spock sort of person. I believe that everything in the universe is logical. If something appears to be illogical it is simply because our knowledge about it is lacking. Unlike Spock though I embrace a wider spectrum of what constitutes logic, eg emotions are very important and relevant....but otherwise I agree completely with his approach to life.This book is all about situations that don't look logical on the surface, but if you dig a little deeper you discover the logic. To that extent i...

I was not impressed. Although I have liked Gladwell's other books, this one was a miss. While I recognize that he finds empirical studies to support the central ideas of his books and am generally okay with that, he went too far with David and Goliath. It was clear that he had a conviction that he wanted to persuade others to adopt and the stories in the book were chosen for that purpose. That part was expected and understandable; the part I couldn't get past was that I have read many of the stu...

*A full executive summary of this book is available here: http://newbooksinbrief.com/2013/10/22...This book is not about underdogs and giants in any conventional sense of these terms. Rather, the book is about the curious nature of advantages and disadvantages, and how each can (under certain circumstances) become its opposite.The first lesson to be learned is that the things we take to be advantages are often no such thing. Our greatest mistake here comes from the fact that we identify a certai...