Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
Malcolm Gladwell takes E.M. Forster's famous instruction, "Only connect," to heart in this fascinating little tome. Around a few key situations--a marriage counselor who can tell in 15 minutes if a couple will stay together, a group of art historians who figure out in two seconds that a statue is a fake while the museum buying it spends 14 months convincing itself the statue is real, a musician whose music is adored by those who give it time but shunned by focus-group testing, a group of police officers who make a tragic, split-second error in judgment--Gladwell builds a narrative that never ceases to engage the reader. How are our perceptions of the world influenced by the calculations our unconscious mind makes in the first moments of any encounter? Gladwell makes the case that these calculations can change everything, from who companies hire into positions of power (tall white men, more often than not) to the way we all know when someone's being insincere not by the words they say but the way our brain processes their facial expressions.
If this sounds like a lot to cram into a 250-page book that can be easily read in one day, it is, and that is the book's chief flaw--we're left wanting more, a lot more, about all of the anecdotes introduced during the book. Gladwell is a master storyteller, and while we're happy to float from one example to another with him, at the end of the book I was left feeling like I'd touched only shallowly on a great many topics about which I'd like to know a lot more. But then, if the worst I can say about Gladwell is that he's piqued my curiousity, that's some pretty faint criticism, isn't it?
Highly recommended.
1 comment:
Sounds extremely interesting. I read "The Tipping Point" a few months back. If you combine what Gladwell says about first impressions with what "The Tipping Point" says about how ideas spread, it paints a fairly scary picture.
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