Book reviews: ‘The American Way of Killing’ and ‘Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up’

‘The American Way of Killing’ by Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell’s breezy, analytical style “may appear to work when addressing a subject that readers have never really thought about,” said Gary Younge in The Guardian. “But it breaks down with one that has been covered extensively”—like gun violence in America, the subject of his newest best seller. No one has been able to adequately diagnose why the U.S. has the highest rate of gun violence in the Western world. And the British-Canadian author of The Tipping Point and Blink hasn’t either, despite taking a different tack. Instead of laying out a single argument, as he’s done in other books, here he offers “a series of discrete, and at times related, observations.” Invoking the tale of the blind men who each focus on just the trunk or just the tusk, he says he hopes these observations will together give us a “sense of the whole elephant.” Yet the approach “somehow misses several elephants in the room.”

“The American Way of Killing may not change minds, but it may loosen them considerably,” said Terri Schlichenmeyer in The Philadelphia Tribune. Staying “calm, considerate, and balanced,” Gladwell argues that our debates about gun violence teem with misunderstandings and misrepresentations. He correctly points out, said Jessa Crispin in The Telegraph (U.K.), that of the roughly 45,000 gun deaths a year, the majority are impulsive or accidental, not the planned mass shootings that make the headlines. Gladwell doesn’t think banning assault-style rifles will change much—they account for a small slice of shootings—but don’t mistake him for a gun rights advocate. He handily argues that the Second Amendment specifically pertains to protecting plantation owners against slave rebellions, not everyone’s right to bear arms. Still, Gladwell is notorious for getting facts wrong, and it’s impossible to read him “without anticipating the long list of corrections that will soon follow.”

I was “genuinely fascinated” by some of Gladwell’s points, said Ron Charles in his Substack newsletter. He explains that American doctors have more experience treating gun wounds than doctors anywhere else in the world, which superficially makes our nation seem less deadly than it is. But I sighed when he accused gun control advocates of engaging in “gun control theater,” one of many examples of “glib overconfidence” that “has the weird effect of making me object even when I agree with him.” And his book “doesn’t ultimately get us much closer to understanding” why we tolerate mass carnage, year after year. “Gladwell behaves as though the answer lies in our failure to see something he can reveal to us with a flourish.” Sadly, “I’m afraid the answers lie in a knot of political, cultural, and financial pathologies strangling this country.”

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‘Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up’ by David Byrne

David Byrne’s ode to rediscovery “belongs on the bookshelf of anyone who cares about creativity or culture,” said Adam Grant in The New York Times. Drawing on his reading of esoteric academic journals, the former Talking Heads frontman has written a “deeply researched, stimulating” account of so-called sleeping beauties: ideas, artworks, and technologies that were ignored, laughed at, or forgotten before ultimately being embraced. His “clear-eyed, hopeful” analysis is a reminder that geniuses “are often overlooked because they emerge ahead of their time” and that— even centuries later—it is “never too late for our work to find an audience.”

Byrne has assembled three-dozen case studies, and “some are better-known than others,” said Sukhdev Sandhu in The Guardian. They include Antoni Gaudí— the now celebrated architect of Barcelona’s towering Sagrada Família—who fell so far from favor that, when he died in 1926 after being hit by a tram, he was mistaken for a beggar. Then there’s 17th-century Dutch master Vermeer. He was largely forgotten until the mid-1800s, when a French critic saw one of his paintings in a museum and published a catalog. But the book’s “most revelatory chapters eschew art for environmental and infrastructural stories.” In one standout, Byrne recounts how southern India’s medieval Chola dynasty financed “a complex network of pools, wells, and tanks” to channel monsoon overflows. Lost for centuries, those waterways have been revived through the work of “dogged” local activists.

“These stories of vindication are inherently compelling,” said Timothy Farrington in The Wall Street Journal. But a larger lesson never coheres, because Byrne sorts his micro-narratives into six “fairly arbitrary” categories that provide little practical guidance in spotting future sleeping beauties. And it’s “disappointing that Byrne writes so little about his own experience as a reanimator”: In 1988, he founded a record label, Luaka Bop, to introduce American audiences to lesser-known classics of world pop and psychedelia. Some of that specificity would have been welcome. Instead, the reader walks away with some “sturdy generalities,” and the lesson that the past “isn’t necessarily worse.”