Blink

Few authors before Malcolm Gladwell could pull off such outstanding brand maintenance. Remarkably, his mass popularity never undermines his reputation as a credible public intellectual, a rigorous, groundbreaking thinker who writes clearly and accessibly. He is an unusually intelligent man who can write and – as his three TED Talks show, speak – in simple bestseller prose. His consistent writing, rather than his deep thinking, may be Gladwell’s true genius. He posits his ideas as new ways of thinking. He cites scientific, academic and anecdotal research and interviews people who describe how they learned that his construct is correct. He’s expert at taking what you know and explaining it back to you in interesting, sometimes even revelatory ways.

Yet, Gladwell isn’t perfect. Blink sometimes reads like a stretched-out magazine article, and it repeats ideas. Some case studies are fascinating; some aren’t. Blink is an incongruous Gladwell book in that if you skip a few pages, you probably won’t miss anything important.