Book of the week: David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants by Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell's new book “teaches little of general import,” but readers will meet many colorful characters.

(Little, Brown, $29)

Malcolm Gladwell is starting to talk down to us, said Craig Seligman in Bloomberg.com. In his popular previous books The Tipping Point and Outliers, this star New Yorker writer did no such thing: He translated surprising findings of social science into useful advice and flattered readers’ intelligence along the way. But his latest has a new tone, and it “really bugged me.” Perhaps anyone would sound patronizing while making this book’s main argument: that underdogs sometimes win, occasionally because of ostensible disadvantages. But that raises a bigger problem: “Reading David and Goliath is to suffer the discomfort of watching a formidably intelligent author flailing—by citing all manner of studies and battering us with charts and tables—to prove something that no one would disagree with in the first place.”

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Maybe feel-good fictions should be all we can expect from a writer who’s become “a Goliath kind of guy,” said Keith Staskiewicz in Entertainment Weekly. Gladwell commands huge speaking fees at business events these days, and “a strong streak of corporatist can-do-ism” runs through his work.That’s why pointing out this book’s flaws isn’t simply a matter of literary criticism, said Archie Bland in The Independent (U.K.). Gladwell’s books have enormous influence in elite circles, yet the stories he’s now telling us “impose a narrative logic on the world that isn’t really there.” When tales of underdog triumph strengthen the cause of those working to tear up society’s safety net, “it’s perhaps time to think a little harder.”