"You, who have shown me great and severe troubles,
Shall revive me again,
And bring me up again from the depths of the earth." -- Psalm 71:20
Before thinking about buying or reading this book, please be aware that all the articles were originally published in The New Yorker. If you are a loyal reader of that excellent publication, you may well have read all these articles before.
The strength of Mr. Gladwell's writing in these non-fiction articles is his ability to become fascinated with something that most people either don't notice . . . or don't long think about. With the persistence of a terrier, he keeps asking questions until some new perspectives appear. In almost all cases, these new perspectives will advance your thinking from where it is today. Unfortunately, in some cases, his curiosity will leave you short of satisfying answers to new questions that his writing raises.
Some of the articles are either brilliant . . . or just short of being so, listed here in the order in which they appear:
Blowing Up: How Nassim Taleb Turned the Inevitability of Disaster into an Investment Strategy
What the Dog Saw: Cesar Millan and the Movements of Mastery
Million-Dollar Murray: Why Problems Like Homelessness May Be Easier to Manage Than to Solve
Connecting the Dots: The Paradoxes of Intelligence Reform
Late Bloomers: Why Do We Equate Genius with Precocity?
Most Likely to Succeed: How Do We Hire When We Can't Tell Who's Right for the Job?
Some of the other stories don't work nearly as well as they might have:
The Pitchman: Ron Popeil and the Conquest of the American Kitchen (doesn't have enough development of why we like to buy gadgets pitched on television)
The Ketchup Conundrum: Mustard Now Comes in Dozens of Varieties. Why Has Ketchup Stayed the Same? (focuses on taste research in the context of a poorly designed ketchup product rather than the question that's stated)
True Colors: Hair Dye and the Hidden History of Postwar America (too slim a premise to capture the important shifts in female self-image)
John Rock's Error: What the Inventor of the Birth Control Pill Didn't Know About Women's Health (the article's point is pushed too far, assuming that Catholic doctrine can be predicted based on health benefits)
Open Secrets: Enron, Intelligence, and the Perils of Too Much Information (doesn't succeed either as an expose or fully as irony)
The Picture Problem: Mammography, Air Power, and the Limits of Looking (too much information for what the subject will bear)
Something Borrowed: Should a Charge of Plagiarism Ruin Your Life? (too speculative to be very helpful)
Dangerous Minds: Criminal Profiling Made Easy (the point is hammered a little too hard)
The Talent Myth: Are Smart People Overrated? (the point is too obvious to keep our interest)
A few of the stories just didn't seem worth including:
The Art of Failure: Why Some People Choke and Others Panic (not much content here)
Blowup: Who Can Be Blamed for a Disaster like the Challenger Explosion? No One, and We'd Better Get Used to It (the point is pretty obscure and I suspect many people won't be interested)
The New-Boy Network: What Do Job Interviews Really Tell Us? (much ado about first impressions)
Troublemakers: What Pit Bulls Can Teach Us About Crime (much data about the dangers of drawing conclusions from impressions of popular press reports)
At any rate, you'll have lots of new information to use for dinner conversation, if nothing else.
Have fun!