I like this author. I love his writing and they way he can relate two things (or more) in such an intimate manner when at first they appear as just random events. That is a gift. This book is the 6th one that I've read by this author. I didn't like it as much as some of his other books. It didn't have the same edge as the others. It did however have some of the same entertainment appeal, so 3 stars.

Another very fascinating book by Gladwell. the ideas that he brings and the way he discusses them with the studies and real events that prove those ideas were very well written.

I have two main issues with the book first was the audio quality but that is a minor issue.

The main issue is one that someone wrote about before and I could not help but notice it now. Gladwell is excellent in showing the reader studies and real events that only support his ideas or claims but does very little in discussing any studies or conflicting ideas with the ones he is writing about. however, I think it is more on the reader rather than the author to look for any ideas that may contradict those of the author.

This book isn't at all what I thought it would be. I was hoping it would be a sort of self help book to pare down my overthinking. It wasn't great for that purpose, but it was great in other ways. One of the things I love most about Malcom Gladwell is that he looks at practical solutions to long standing problems rather than trying to blame them on a person or a group of people. Here he looks at how experts in a subject can often make excellent unconscious decisions but even those experts can also be affected by bias, especially in adrenaline producing situations. There's a lot more too it, but as always he doesn't aim to make you mad at anyone, but rather to make you think about solutions. He has some great ideas here, but sadly it's been 16 years since he wrote this and no one has tried them.

Making a decision is, most of the time, a difficult task. Should I consider all the factors involved or should I trust my first instinct? Well, this is what this book is about: it brings up a lot of case studies, highly varied, in which are debated all elements that lead to the decision process.

Below quote, Sigmund Freud's, pretty much summarize the conclusion of experiments presented in this book:

“When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature.”

However, as the author states, making a decision is not quite simple: it is a mixture between conscious and unconscious analysis.

The writing style is very accessible, the stories more than interesting - Mr. Gladwell is an exceptional story-teller. He is not imposing his believes, he just opens your eyes to see also another side of the issues we confront with every day.

I was really expecting more from this book. I've heard mostly good things about Gladwell, and he had a pretty interesting TED talk, and I enjoy almost anything to do with the brain, so...why not?

The book certainly brought up a lot of interesting ideas and did a good job of discussing the different elements that go into the snap decisions that we make every day. And it's probably worth a read for many of the stories and experiments related. But for the most part this book really failed to impress. More than that though, it failed at being a coherent analysis of what goes on in the human brain when we make snap judgments.

Gladwell alternates between telling us to trust and accept this "mysterious phenomena" that allows us to make these unconscious snap judgments and warning us against the use of these snap judgments. One moment he advises against the idea that we need to slowly collect data and weigh options to make the most informed opinion and provides examples where too much thinking and information leads us astray, and in the next moment gives us examples of how snap judgments sometimes go horribly wrong. And he leaves us with no clear sense of how to use this new found information to make better decisions and judgments in our own lives. Do I trust my insights because my rational brain will fool me, or do I mistrust my instincts because of the inherent bias contained within them? If Gladwell knows he sure didn't tell me.

One example of somewhere where I think he didn't analyze the situation enough was when he talked about the Wisconsin Card Sorting task (pick cards from one of two decks, one deck tends towards bad and the other towards good outcomes). He focused solely on how the unconscious mind was aware of the pattern (which deck was bad and which was good) long before the conscious mind was aware of it when making decisions. And this was shown by the fact that sweating occurred when choosing from the "bad" deck before the subject knew why (or was even aware of it). What he fails to mention about all this is that the reason for this is because we are designed to be "risk averse". It is not because we are making brilliant snap judgments, or that our brains have "learned" the rules before we are aware of it. From an evolutionary perspective it pays off more to learn from our mistakes than learn from our victories. Mistakes are costly. This is why bad memories are more salient than happy ones. The sweating that occurs is a physiological indicator of and means of prompting the organism to stay away. It's not even that this explanation is in contradiction to Gladwell's; it is that it IS an explanation for the phenomena Gladwell describes, one easily at Gladwells' disposal.

Two other aspects of this book stuck out as major frustrations for me:

1) Gladwell spends a lot of time early on talking about the mysterious nature of our ability to thin slice (make accurate snap judgments based on very little information) and urges us to accept this. To his credit, he does attempt to demystify this somewhat later on, but not enough in my opinion. His first example is of a museum that purchased an expensive sculpture which all the data and scientists evaluated as legitimate, but which experts in the field immediately saw as a fake without being able to put into words why. It's purposefully misleading to label this as some sort of mysterious phenomena. For instance, it's important to remember that these people were experts. An amateur would not and could not make this same snap judgment because they don't have the training to. This ability didn't magically appear, it came from learning and training and synaptic change. These experts learned over time. They studied types of stone, and different styles, and everything else that goes into understanding their field. And this process created memories...synaptic change within their brains. And there exists a system (or systems) in the brain that can make decisions based on that neuronal structure without conscious awareness. Shortcuts so to speak. But these shortcuts are a product of that neuronal structure, which is a product of that synaptic change, which is a product of the learning the individual did over time. It's misleading to call this mysterious. What's important, and more interesting in my opinion, is figuring out the underlying processes that allow this to happen.

2) Towards the end of the book Gladwell discusses how our stress response leads us to make all sorts of bad decisions. He talks about autism and how autistic people can't mind read (don't have theories of other minds) and how this affects their interpretation of events around them and of the world in general. He compares what happens to people in stressful situations to this, that during these situations, because the fight or flight response has taken over, people have tunnel vision and can no longer "read minds" and thus make all sorts of mistakes and bad decisions because they are focusing on the wrong things. My issue is that he, incomprehensibly, makes a literal, as opposed to metaphorical, connection with autism. He argues that during these times we become "temporarily autistic". While it's true that one aspect of our behavior becomes similar to an aspect of an autistic individuals behavior during these times, it seems like a pretty ridiculous statement to make as a broad generalization. He spends quite a bit of time talking about this and I don't think it does anyone any good.

In the end I think I was most disappointed by the fact that all the elements to create a good book WERE present here, and the failure is due in large part to how he puts it all together and his ability to analyze all the disparate ideas properly (insert irony here). Evolution has built into us shortcuts to react quickly to stimuli in our environment. Our experience, whether broadly cultural or personal, prunes, enhances, changes those built in shortcuts as we go through life. Some develop as unfair biases towards people of different races. Some develop as we become experts in a subject. Thus some can be trusted and some can't. Our brains can't tell the difference between fact and fiction, only between experience and non experience, and so it's important to be aware of what kind of decision making goes on under the surface and what factors are involved in those decisions so we can be more aware of whether to trust them or not. Other factors can affect decision making, such as our emotional state due to the physiological changes that take place during those times, and this too is important to understand because it radically alters our perception during those times. The most important thing to remember is that experience translates into instinct through synaptic change, and through work and training we can increase the effectiveness of our gut reactions and snap decisions, but due to biases and our altered states during emotional situations those instincts should not always be trusted outright. There you go Malcolm Gladwell, please feel free to use this in the next printing. No citation necessary.

2.5 Stars

Thin slicing refers to the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience. A relationship between two people has a fist as well: a distinctive signature that arises naturally and automatically. People are in one of two states in a relationship:
1. Positive sentiment override where positive emotion overrides irritability
2. Negative sentiment override, people draw lasting conclusions about each other

Part of what it means to take thin-slicing and first impressions seriously is accepting the fact that sometimes we can know more about someone or something in the blink of an eye than we can after months of study. The giant computer that is our unconscious silently crunches all the data it can from the experiences we've had, the people we've met, the lessons we've learned, the books we've read, the movies we've seen and so on, it forms an opinion.

Our first impressions are generated by our experiences and our environment, which means that we can changes our first impressions - we can alter the way we think we think-slice, by changing the experiences that comprise those impressions. How good people's decisions are under the fast-moving, high stress conditions of rapid cognition is a function of training, rules and rehearsal.

Insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out. From experience, we gain a powerful gift, the ability to act instinctively in the moment. Understanding the true nature of instinctive decision making requires us to be forgiving of those people trapped in circumstances where good judgment is imperiled.

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Notes:

The adaptive unconscious:

The part of our brain that leaps to conclusions is called the adaptive unconscious, and the study of this kind of decision making is one of the most important new fields in psychology. It is not to be confused with the unconscious described by Sigmund Freud, which was a dark and murky place filled with desires and memories and fantasies that were too disturbing for us to think about consciously. This new notion of the adaptive unconscious is thought of, instead, as a kind of giant computer that quickly and quietly processes a lot of the data we need in order to keep functioning as human beings.

When you walk out into the street and suddenly realise that a truck is bearing down on you, do you have time to think through all your options? Of course not. The only way that human beings could ever have survived as a species for as long as we have is that we've developed another kind of decision-making apparatus that's capable of making very quick judgements based on very little information........ As the psychologist Timothy D. Wilson writes in his book Strangers to Ourselves The adaptive unconscious does an excellent job of sizing up the world, warning people of danger, setting goals, and initiating action in a sophisticated and efficient manner.

Wilson says that we toggle back and forth between our conscious and unconscious modes of thinking, depending on the situation. A decision to invite a co-worker over for dinner is conscious.... The spontaneous decision to argue with that same co-worker is made unconsciously - by a different part of the brain and motivated by a different part of your personalit

The problem with Coke versus Pepsi taste tests:

The difficulty with interpreting the Pepsi Challenge findings begins with the fact that they were based on what the industry calls a sip test. Tasters don't drink the entire can. They take a sip from a cup of each of the brands being tested and then make their choice. ........ Dollard says that one of the biases in a sip test is toward sweetness: "If you only test in a sip test consumers will like the sweeter product. But when they have to drink a whole bottle or can, that sweetness can get really overpowering or cloying." Pepsi is sweeter than Coke, so right away it had a big advantage in a sip test. Pepsi is also characterized by a citrusy flavour burst, unlike the more raisiny-vanilla taste of Coke. But that burst tends to dissipate over the course of an entire can, and that is another reason Coke suffered by comparison. Pepsi, in short, is a drink built to shine in a sip test. (159)

We are hugely influenced by the way things look:

Researchers did blind tastings with the two brandies Christian Brothers and E & J. Their tests showed that people's preferences were totally based on the packaging of the brandies. Other tests with ice cream blocks, have shown that people are willing to pay 5-10 cents more, depending upon whether ice creams were packaged in rectangular or cylindrical packaging. (162 & 164)

The experts: Gladwell goes to lunch with two professional food tasters:

Gail Vance Civille and Judy Heylmun ...are experts. Would they get fooled by the Pepsi Challenge? Of course not. Nor would they be led astray by the packaging for Christian Brothers, or be as easily confused by the difference between something they truly don't like and something they simply find unusual. The gift of their expertise is that it allows them to have a much better understanding of what goes on behind the locked door of their unconscious..... It is really only experts who are able to reliably account for their reactions..... Expert food tasters are taught a very specific vocabulary, which allows them to describe precisely their reactions to specific foods. Mayonnaise, for example, is supposed to be evaluated along six dimensions of appearance (colour, colour intensity, chroma, shine, lumpiness and bubbles), ten dimensions of texture (adhesiveness to lips, firmness, denseness, and so on), and fourteen dimensions of flavour, split among three subgroups - aromatics (eggy, mustardy, and so forth); basic tastes (salty, sour, and sweet); and chemical-feeling factors (burn, pungent, astringent) Each of those factors, in turn, is evaluated on a 15-point scale..... Every product in the supermarket can be analysed along these lines, and after a taster has worked with these scales for years, they become embedded in the taster's unconscious.

Those of us who are not experts:

This does not mean that when we are outside our areas of passion and experience, our reactions are invariably wrong. It just means that they are shallow. They are hard to explain and easily disrupted. They aren't grounded in real understanding. (184)

Hiring people to play in orchestras:

When hiring a new musician, in the last 30 years it has become common to use screens to hide the auditioning musicians from the selection committee. This way prejudice against women can be avoided. It has made a big difference. The number of women in the top US orchestras has increased fivefold in the last 30 years. (250)

When to trust the subconscious, and when to think things through:

When should we trust our instincts, and when should we consciously think things through? Well here is a partial answer. On straightforward choice, deliberate analysis is best. When questions of analysis and personal choice start to get complicated - when we have to juggle many different variables - then our unconscious thought processes may be superior. This is exactly contrary to conventional wisdom. We typically regard our snap judgement as best on immediate trivial questions. Is that person attractive? Do I want that candy bar? But Dijksterhuis is suggesting the opposite: that maybe that big computer in our brain that handles our unconscious is at its best when it has to juggle many competing variables. ..... As Sigmund Freud said "When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, i think, by the deep inner needs of our nature." (268)

This was a big best-seller for Gladwell. He posits that much of the time we make decisions, reach conclusions in a sort of pre-conscious manner that he calls “thin-slicing.” That means taking a very small sample, a thin slice, and making a decision immediately based on that information. However, it is the case that the ability to evaluate that slice is fed by a lifetime of experience. It is not simply, as some, including President Bush the second, might believe, that using one’s gut, in the absence of years and years of preparation, is as valid a way of reaching decisions as taking the longer route of careful analysis of available data. No, no, no.

مالکوم گلادول می‌آموزد که گاهی همانند ماجرای مجسمه‌ی کورو یا شبیه‌سازی جنگ، باید به حس خود اعتماد داشته باشیم و تجزیه و تحلیل اضافی جز خراب کردن تصمیممان، فایده‌ای ندارد. (مصداق خطایی که دیگران مانند دوبلی، کانمن و نسیم طالب به عنوان خطای اطلاعات اضافی مطرح می‌کنند)
گاهی هم مانند قضیه‌ی نوشابه‌های پپسی و ماجرای دیالو باید از ناخودآگاه پیروی نکرد و بررسی دقیقتری نمود. البته که تمرین زیاد ممکن است باعث ‌شود متخصصانی بوجود بیایند و مهارتی کسب نمایند که ناخودآگاهشان از خودآگاهشان دقیقتر باشد.
در ماجرای کوک‌کانتی زمانی را توضیح داد که کم، زیاد می‌شود و براساس اطلاعات غیرضروری اضافی پزشکان ممکن است تصمیمهای نادرستی گرفته شود؛ پس نیازی به اینهمه اطلاعات جانبی بیهوده نیست.
یاد داد گاهی باید چشمان را بست و به صدای نواختن ساز گوش داد تا موسیقی را درک و از پیشداوری پرهیز کرد.
گفت زشت و زیبا نسبی هستند و چیزهای عجیب معمولا زشت به نظر می‌رسند ولی ممکن است بعد از مدتی که عادی شدند، نهایت زیبایی باشند و دیگران در تقلید آن از یکدیگر سبقت بگیرند.
توضیح داد برای سنجش لذت بردن یا عدم لذت بردن از بعضی چیزها همانند نوشابه و موسیقی، جرعه‌ای نوشیدن و لحظه‌ای گوش دادن فایده‌ ندارد؛ بلکه باید با آنها زیست.
گلادول اثر هاله را برایم تکرار کرد؛ جایی که وارن هاردینگ که دیگران از روی ظاهر و رفتار تردیدی نداشتند رئیس جمهور بزرگی خواهد شد و ناخودآگاه لقب رئیس جمهور بزرگ را برایش بکار می‌بردند، در زمره‌ی روسای جمهور بد و ناموفق آمریکا درآمد.
شمّ اقتصادی و تواناییهای ذاتی افراد را به رخ کشید تا خواننده حواسش به استعدادهایش باشد؛ جایی که موفقیتهای جک ولش و افراد مشابهش را مدیون تصمیم‌گیریهای فوری و قدرت نگاه آنها معرفی کرد نه مدیریت، کار زیاد و روشهای مناسب. (البته که بی‌تأثیر هم نیست)
کتاب نسبتا خوب ترجمه شده بود ولی ای کاش مترجم، نوشتار لاتین اسامی فراوانی که در کتاب نام برده شده‌اند را به صورت زیرنویس می‌آورد تا مراجعه به اطلاعات تکمیلی آسانتر باشد یا حداقل بتوانیم این اسمها را درست تلفظ کنیم. ضمنا بعضی جاها می‌توانست توضیحات تکمیلی ارائه کند که جایش واقعا خالی بود. برخی اغلاط تایپی هم در چاپ کتاب مشاهده می‌شد.
شاید بعضی از موضوعات برایم تکراری بود به این دلیل که آنها را از زبان دیگران خوانده بودم ولی برایم ارزشمند بود چرا که اینقدر باید آنها را مطالعه و در آن تفکر کرد تا به مهارت تبدیل شوند.

Where does it all go, after you are done experiencing the experience, thinking the thought, feeling the feeling? Nothing is ever lost. The subconscious is like a vast warehouse, limitless, in fact, and as Malcolm Gladwell illustrates in Blink, we access all that is stored in that warehouse with every blinking and waking moment.

Usually, we call this instant access - gut instinct. Or, the inner voice of wisdom. Instinct, however, is nothing magical or mysterious. It is simply our accumulated and stored knowledge over a lifetime. If there was ever an argument for listening to those who have some serious and well-lived years under their belts, this is it. Blink illustrates with numerous and widely varied examples how life experience, the more the better, contributes to our ability to make quick, yet sound decisions. In fact, the quicker, the better.

Blink is about what the author calls "thin slicing." He defines this process as the moment of time in which we all make snap judgments. Two seconds, two minutes ... and we make an assessment of a situation or a person or a circumstance. The fascinating thing is - these snap judgments are, more often than not, precise ones. It is when we begin to over analyze and rationalize that we tend to go awry. The trick is to allow the accumulated wisdom rise up and do its magic, trust in it.

Then again ...

Gladwell never does make a concluding statement in his book, and perhaps it is up to the reader to decide (do it quickly?), but his many fascinating examples and his reports on various studies can lead one to think these snap judgments are the way to go - or, then again, thinker beware. For all the many situations in which that moment of initial wisdom is uncannily precise, there are other times that our deeply ingrained biases muck up the clarity of that process. Gladwell cites data to illustrate how stereotypes, for instance, persist - no matter how gallant our conscious efforts to overcome them. Telling yourself you don't really think what you think simply won't work. Only exposure to experiences, or positive visualizations, will change the false ideas and images our subconscious has absorbed over time. All of which is a strong argument for "garbage in, garbage out." That is, be careful of what entertainment you choose (e.g. pornographic images, violent movies or games, etc.), because no matter how hard your conscious mind tries to guide you toward decisions and behavior that is more appropriate, your subconscious will always, but always win out.

The idea of what you present to your eye is what you will later project out to the world is a convincing one, as the author finds himself unable to beat the test on stereotypes when he has to react quickly. Only exposure to more positive images over time can change his test results and dislodge his prejudices.

Gladwell discusses this phenomena of instant response-true response in a manner of ways. How patients respond to their doctors (we sue the physician who has a lousy bedside manner, even if more skilled, but remain loyal to the physician who spends as little as three extra minutes talking with us); how facial expressions, when viewed on slowed down video, will without fail, always reveal deceit (there are facial movements that arise from our subconscious that we cannot control, and no matter how quickly we think we have our facial mask in place, there is always that instant that our faces tell the truth); the intricacies of marketing and advertisement and why the obvious ad, even when based on feedback of focus groups, may not be the effective choice; how military decisions by experienced military leaders are successful, but fail miserably when they are constrained by strategic analysis; how micro-managing in workplaces can only lead to mediocrity while suppressing creativity and innovation; how speed dating may be most effective in finding potential lifelong connections (we read about research that can pick out successful, longterm relationships in observing as little as two minutes of interaction between a couple - and no, it isn't the couple that argues that breaks apart); how our societal subconscious biases for certain physical characteristics, such as height or gender, often mislead us to make dangerously faulty snap judgments (Gladwell observes that most of our leaders are tall and male, and that our corporate world pays tall men higher salaries, factoring dollars down to the inch, regardless of intelligence or ability). On and on, in one fascinating example and study after another, Gladwell intrigues with his findings.

And you know he's right. You know it ... in your gut. But if the author doesn't make any overall conclusion from all of this fascinating data, then the reader is left to her own wiles. Experience counts more than credentials. What we expose ourselves to on a regular basis molds who we are, how we view others, what choices we make and how we behave. Biases and prejudices are far stronger than our conscious will to overcome them; we must align our environment to align our subconscious. Our deepest self forgets nothing. All we have ever done and been and seen and observed leads to who we are today and tomorrow.

All of which gives one pause. But don't pause too long. It is that initial millisecond that may matter most of all.

This was the first Gladwell book I read.

I read and finished it during my backpacking trip across Cambodia. I read it amongst the ruins of ancient temples, on bumpy dusty tuk-tuk rides, I held on to it while on the boat waiting for the freshwater dolphins to crest the surface of the mighty Mekong, I read it while sitting cross legged on the floor of the aisle of a public bus on the 2-hour ride back to Siem Reap.

But even without all that hazy semi-sense-of-adventure-backpacking state of mind... I would still recommend this book to anyone. Or any of Mssr Gladwell's books honestly speaking (up to the date of this review I have read them all except for 'Tipping Point' and 'David & Goliath', ironically -or maybe rather quite properly Gladwellian- the first & latest of his books).

In a nutshell, this book is about how intrinsically we know things. But how all that is usually drowned out or pushed to the corner of ones mind by a lot of good old crusty 'preconception', 'social upbringing' and 'societal brainwashing'. But maybe it's not something that comes when we think about it.

Anyhow the main concept/theory in this book is not bedrock to be sure, but somewhat elastic. Something to be taken with a grain of salt. Just as relying too much on facts and proof takes the fun out of life, not caring at all about facts and proof takes out the foundations of sound character.

Trust your gut, people. Trust your gut. But don't try too hard.

In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell explores the phenomenon he calls 'thin slicing'; the human ability to winnow out, in fractions of a second, salient facts from a mass of information and make a decision based on them. Something most of us do all the time without giving it much conscious thought – reading the facial expressions and body language of the people with whom we interact, walking down a busy street (or a quiet street late at night), our subconscious minds processing hundreds or even thousands of bits of information, deciding which few are important and making a judgement based on them.

Gladwell illustrates his thesis using several extended examples. The first is relatively straight forward. In 1983 California's Getty museum was offered a 2500 year old Greek statue, a kouros, for $10 million. All the tests said it was genuine but several art experts, at first glance and without being able to say precisely why, knew it was a fake. He also tells the stories of how an ugly chair conquered the offices of the world, how we are all effected by racial conditioning, how Chicago's Cook County hospital improved diagnosis of heart attacks by removing a physician's knowledge from the process, how a commander using WWII technology defeated the combined might of the the US armed forces in the largest ever war game, and more.

The author uses two main studies to demonstrate how this process of instant assessment works. John Gottman's 'love lab', where he gets couples to talk about a subject tangentially connected with their relationship and videos the exchange to bring out the non-verbal cues, and Paul Ekman, who is an expert of facial micro-expressions that last microseconds and over which we have no control (this latter also being the model for the excellent TV show Lie To Me with Tim Roth). Gladwell builds his argument convincingly and refers back to his examples frequently for both illustration and dramatic effect. Each example he uses shows a different facet of the Blink effect but also, and this is vital, how it can go wrong in certain circumstances.

While it is quick, this subconscious ability does require a moment to work, and can be short circuited by rushing or by an overload of adrenaline. Another case study chillingly shows what can happen when our subconscious is not given the opportunity to work properly. In 1999 an unarmed, innocent man, Amadou Diallo, was shot 41 times in the entryway of his own New York apartment building, by four policemen. He shows how a lack of experience, over-hasty action and perhaps even the over-confidence of numbers allowed these policemen to fall back on crude stereotypes and allow an initial poor assessment to lead them down a tragic course of events.

While Gladwell lauds the benefits of both listening to this subconscious supercomputer and developing the skills, in backing up the studies he constantly refers to the fact that this understanding has often been achieved by the exact opposite type of mentation – deliberate, analytical evaluation of evidence. This, along with the examples given, should show the reader that there are appropriate and inappropriate areas for this sort of thinking, although I can imagine some of the readership taking away only the face-value lesson of relying on first instincts and gut feelings. I would have liked to see a chapter on the abuse of these impressions, which is after all how con artists and frauds such as psychics operate. This could have been perhaps added into the chapter on Warren G. Harding, who was elected as US president because he was tall, handsome, masculine, dignified – and is considered by historians to be one of the worst presidents in US history. I want to take nothing away from this excellent book, however. It is superbly written, making excellent use of pacing and the storylines of the examples he uses to give the book structure. Malcolm Gladwell has a great style, authoritative and engaging, and he packs a great deal of both information and analysis into what is a quick, easy and enjoyable read.