The Girl with the Bookshelf Mind

Malcolm Gladwell makes sense of chaos. Perhaps that is because he is a journalist. Journalists work to gather a lot of information from various sources and make it concise so the public can read and interpret that information.

Gladwell looks for patterns. He finds what the norm is and compares that to outliers or abnormalities. He points out why a story doesn’t turn out the way you might originally expect. That’s the reoccurring theme in his books. He takes a series of stories and connects them through a central question of abnormalities. That’s what was expected to happen in his new book.

Gladwell released David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants on Oct. 1. Fans of his, including this writer, greatly anticipated this book after his first four books landed on The New York Times Bestseller List. Those books are The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, and What the Dog Saw.

The book opens with the biblical tale of David and Goliath. This story is familiar to practically everyone, even if your only insight to the tale was through talking vegetables reenacting it in Veggie Tales.

David and Goliath is the tale of the underdog defeating the overconfident giant. It is a classic tale duplicated in literature, movies, and life. Everyone likes an underdog, like the Chicago Cubs, who haven’t won a World Series title in over a hundred years.

Which confuses Gladwell’s readers. Why is he tackling a topic that is so familiar? The underdog defeats the giant. It makes you feel like saying, “Well, duh!” You start to wonder if the book is going to go deeper than this familiar idea.

Of course, the reader feels silly in questioning Gladwell. Because he never disappoints.

Yes, his stories center on the underdog prevailing. But right after introducing the idea of David and Goliath, Gladwell takes off. It’s like a rollercoaster going over the first rise. He speeds off in a direction you didn’t predict, and now you’re going with him, following his train of logic.

Underdogs have become the usual. We expect that they might have a chance of winning, even if that chance is slim. But Gladwell shows when the underdog idea no longer works.

Gladwell thrives on statistical data that becomes simple for the literary world. He uses the idea of a U-Curve, saying that at some point the methods underdogs use will level out, and if pushed farther, it will become extreme and start to adversely affect the underdog.

As usual, he uses a series of examples to show the reader his point, leaving the reader unable to refute his findings. He uses examples that are unique and generally unheard of. This works perfectly in his favor because then his readers consider his theory with a fresh mind free of preconceived notions. They can keep an open mind to what he has to say, see all the facts, and then come to a conclusion. Spoiler alert: that conclusion is Gladwell’s conclusion.

He introduces a girls’ basketball team equipped with players who had no experience. Their underdog strategy was to play full court press, making the other team nervous and prone to mistakes that allowed the underdog team to make shots that didn’t require a ton of skill.

He introduced a student in love with science, but when she became a small fish in a big pond, gave up on her dream. If she had been a big fish in a small pond at a college not considered “Ivy League”, she could have succeeded at her dream.

He even explored a more global predicament in the persecution of Northern Island’s Catholic residents. When the British troops attacked too severely against the underdog Catholics, their extremism failed. Too many people were affected by the troops, making their methods ineffective.

If readers were presented with these stories without Gladwell’s analysis, they would have a difficult time making sense of them. That’s Gladwell’s talent. He makes the confusing clear.

Remember when I was confused about why he would write an entire book on a concept supposedly so well understood by the world? He explained it and made it perfectly plain why he wrote this book: because we don’t have a complete grasp of the underdog. His book proves that.