Malcolm Gladwell Is America’s Best-Paid Fairy-Tale Writer
20th January 2014
“If my books appear oversimplified, then you shouldn’t read them.” Malcolm Gladwell’s invitation to avoid reading his books, made recently in an interview in The Guardian, has a certain charm. He conveys the impression of a writer who, aware of critics who accuse him of cherry-picking the results of complex academic research to support simple-minded stories, defiantly insists on his right to do something different—to write in what he has described, in a riposte to one of his critics, as “the genre of what might be called ‘intellectual adventure stories.’?” If his books do not display the intellectual rigor that is supposed to attach to academic writings, Gladwell seems to be suggesting, it is because they serve a different purpose. Interweaving academic research with real-life stories, Gladwell aims—as he puts it—“to get people to look at the world a little differently.” Using the power of a storyteller, he is bringing “the amazing worlds of psychology and sociology to a broader audience,” an exercise that is capable of producing nothing less than a shift in the worldview of his readers.
No one can doubt Gladwell’s ability to reach large audiences. The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers were all tremendous best-sellers, leading some to conclude that Gladwell has invented a new genre of popular writing. In David and Goliath, Gladwell again applies the formula that has been so successful in the past. Deploying a mixture of affecting narratives of struggle against the odds with carefully chosen academic papers, he contends that the powerless are more powerful than those who appear to wield much of the power in the world. To many, this may appear counterintuitive, he suggests; but by marshaling a variety of historical examples ranging from the American struggle for civil rights to the Troubles in Northern Ireland, leavened with homely tales of the trials and triumphs of basketball teams and fortified with forays into sociology and psychology, Gladwell thinks that he can persuade the reader to accept the difficult truth that the weak are not as weak as the reader imagines. If they play their cards right, they can prevail against the strong.