David and Goliath: The Triumph of the Underdog
Malcolm Gladwell, the #1 bestselling author of The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, and What the Dog Saw, offers his most provocative---and dazzling---book yet. Three thousand years ago on a battlefield in ancient Palestine, a shepherd boy felled a mighty warrior with nothing more than a stone and...
show more
Malcolm Gladwell, the #1 bestselling author of The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, and What the Dog Saw, offers his most provocative---and dazzling---book yet. Three thousand years ago on a battlefield in ancient Palestine, a shepherd boy felled a mighty warrior with nothing more than a stone and a sling, and ever since then the names of David and Goliath have stood for battles between underdogs and giants. David's victory was improbable and miraculous. He shouldn't have won. Or should he have? In David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell challenges how we think about obstacles and disadvantages, offering a new interpretation of what it means to be discriminated against, or cope with a disability, or lose a parent, or attend a mediocre school, or suffer from any number of other apparent setbacks. Gladwell begins with the real story of what happened between the giant and the shepherd boy those many years ago. From there, David and Goliath examines Northern Ireland's Troubles, the minds of cancer researchers and civil rights leaders, murder and the high costs of revenge, and the dynamics of successful and unsuccessful classrooms---all to demonstrate how much of what is beautiful and important in the world arises from what looks like suffering and adversity. In the tradition of Gladwell's previous bestsellers---The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers and What the Dog Saw---David and Goliath draws upon history, psychology, and powerful storytelling to reshape the way we think of the world around us.
show less
Format: ebook
ISBN:
9780316204385 (0316204382)
Publish date: October 1st 2013
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Pages no: 304
Edition language: English
As the first book I've read by Gladwell, I can see what the fuss is about. His approach to passing along a conclusion by telling an anecdote has become a go to technique in non-fiction. I thought his conclusions, though, were kind of weakly drawn. This one seems to have less of a grand overarching t...
Malcolm Gladwell has always impressed me with his ability to take seemingly disparate elements and link them together to reach a new understanding of a subject. Reading Outliers was like watching a magic trick. This time around, however, Gladwell's book resembles not so much the work of an adroit sc...
I got this book through the Goodreads First Reads giveaway. The idea of studying why and how underdogs beat the odds is intriguing. Gladwell uses two or more real-life examples in every chapter and tie them together with some statistical data to support his premise, but I thought the connection betw...
My usual Malcolm Gladwell review... fascinating anecdotes that make me think about interesting things, but with oversimplified conclusions stemming from wild extrapolations. The book is not very coherent overall either, reading very much like a draft.Meh.
Just love the many different subjects Gladwell tackles. Found the explanation of the David and Goliath story impressive. I think he has mastered the way people think and feel about things, and how their thinking may be faulty. What one thinks is the best thing is often not. Subjects from College, to...