Blink

Clearly, having finished my second Malcolm Gladwell book in four days, I can't say that I hate the guy's stuff. My biggest complaint about The Tipping Point wasn't Gladwell's writing style, but rather his book structure in general. And here once again I've found that although his sentences and paragraphs flow quite pleasantly before my eyes, Gladwell just doesn't seem capable of making a coherent nonfiction book with a centralized - or even recurring - topic. In a way, he can be forgiven for his pointlessness as he tends to tackle very ambiguous subjects to begin with; The Tipping Point was about that moment when a trend or a fad becomes a phenomenon, and Blink is about the way we react instantaneously to some things without consciously using our brains to think about them. You know, gut reactions, if you will. But in 250 pages, Blink never actually got around to explaining any cognitive processes. With all due respect to Gladwell - who has even described this book as more of an "adventure through our subconscious" than a wealth of actual knowledge - there's really nothing in the book that can't be summed up as an interesting anecdote. For example, we learn that Pepsi beats Coke in taste tests because it is sweeter and taste tests are based on small sips, a proper portion size in which we favor sweet items. That's our "instant" reaction. But if we drink a whole can of each, we're more likely to enjoy Coke more because eventually the extra sweetness in Pepsi becomes a detriment. Cool. Fun fact. Interesting, and somewhat related to the concept of "thinking without thinking." But then Gladwell goes on to discuss how these sip-sized taste tests led Coke to modify their cola in the 1980s in the "New Coke" fiasco. And then he explains why it backfired. All of this was still interesting, sure, but it was totally unrelated to what was supposedly the theme of the book: snap judgments made in the "blink" of an eye. We hear about some over-aggressive cops. We learn about the early struggles and eventual success of the Aeron office chair. We hear the story of a totally embarrassing military simulation gone wrong. We learn that a hospital in Chicago revolutionized the process of evaluating a patient for a heart attack. And on an excitement level, all of it ranges from "not boring" to "pretty cool." But at the end of the book, the dots are left unconnected. And that doesn't make Gladwell a bad writer. It just makes him a bad book-maker, if that makes sense. I wouldn't say that this book needs to be avoided. I actually enjoyed it a little bit more than The Tipping Point. I just can't say that either book succeeded in informing me about its alleged main subject. But hey, no big deal. At least this book never won the Newbery Medal.