David And Goliath Gladwell Analysis

A simple glance at the front cover of Malcolm Gladwell’s “David and Goliath” reveals a few things about Gladwell himself; he’s authored numerous other works, he’s a national bestseller, and he has a fondness for routinely boring, stark white book covers. Just above the bolded title—a place most readers probably won't pay much attention to—typed in the smallest font on the cover, is a seemingly unassertive New York Times quote that is meant to highlight the book’s excellence. “As always,” it reads, “Gladwell’s sweep is breathtaking and thought-provoking.” But like most of Gladwell’s writing in David and Goliath, the abbreviated quote is meant to impress and excite without being properly committed to being honest. “What it is not, however,”
His particular brand of pop psychology always produces engaging and cathartic stories (who doesn’t love a good underdog?), but they never actually prove anything of great importance. The effect is like watching someone use robust charts and statistics to try to prove something that nobody would ever reasonably dispute. Unsurprisingly. this is not a new frontier for Gladwell; critics of his work have coined the term “Gladwell Feint” to refer to the rhetorical technique where he “questions the obvious...tells us we have it wrong…and we know we have it right. He surprises us … and his surprise fulfills our expectations. He makes us anxious that we don't know something…only to assure us that we've known it all along” ( Junod). This “feint” is underscored by the general tone of the book which, at moments, is best described as self-aggrandizing and smugly condescending. “Did you follow that?”(43) Gladwell asks—unironically concerned and patronizing—after a mere five sentence summary of a
In chapter two, Gladwell writes about Caroline Sacks, a college freshman who attended Brown University with a rigorous science major, but ultimately dropped out because she felt insignificant and incapable of succeeding among the erudite student body Ivy Leagues are known to foster. In other words, Caroline felt like a little fish in a big bond, and Gladwell claims she would have been better served attending a less prestigious and demanding school where she could have excelled as a big fish in a little pond. It’s an interesting story, but one of little significance or relevance to the theme of the book; shouldn’t Caroline have been an underdog at Brown? What happened to her hidden advantages? Why isn’t being a little fish in a big pond a desirable difficulty like with David Boies and the other successful dyslexics? It’s unclear. Gladwell cannot explain why some difficulties are desirable and others are not (maybe because they just