In David and Goliath: Underdogs Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants, Malcolm Gladwell quotes the English essayist Thomas De Quincey who said, "It is, or it is not, according to the nature of men, an advantage to be orphaned at an early age". That's pretty much the crux of this book: Traits or experiences that may look like weaknesses or disadvantages might actually become advantages to the right person. I emphasise that because it seems to be the point that Gladwell most glosses over: He makes the point, for example, that 30% of entrepreneurs tend to be dyslexic (like Richard Branson or Brian Grazer) but a quick google search shows that 50% of the prison population is also dyslexic; despite the power-of-the-underdog thesis that Gladwell is trying to prove here, we can never forget that it is the temperament of the underdog himself that determines whether he will overcome or be overwhelmed by the odds stacked against him.
Like always, Gladwell is an interesting storyteller, and right from the beginning, with the Biblical account of David and Goliath, I was drawn in -- I had never considered (or been informed) that in the famous titular confrontation, David with his speed and long-range sling was pretty much guaranteed to win against the giant (who was weighted down with brass armour and weapons and perhaps suffering from genetic disorders related to giganticism) so long as David refused to battle Goliath on his own terms; in hand-to-hand combat. Like Captain Kirk refusing to play by the rules of the Kobayashi Maru scenario, Gladwell makes the case that innovators are often disagreeable in the sense that they don't care if their behaviour conforms to society's expectations. And I'm pointedly name-dropping Captain Kirk there to ask the question, "If this theory has its counterpart in pop culture, is it really ground-breaking?" Gladwell can show his inverted-U graph to demonstrate that above a certain income (currently $75k/year) extra income doesn't bring extra happiness and that too much money is simply a burden, but Notorious B.I.G. already told us that "mo money is mo problems". And while Nietzsche may have said it first, didn't Kelly Clarkson say it best when she sang "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger"? Again, are these ground-breaking theories if they've made it to the Hit Parade?
As much as I did enjoy each individual story, there is one section that I object to: Gladwell tells of the murder of Kimber Reynolds, an 18-year-old victim of a car-jacking gone awry. In response, her father Mike drafted the Three Strikes Law that was put into practise in California in an effort to keep repeat offenders off the streets. Gladwell allows the still grieving father to proudly state that the stats show that the law is responsible for a drop in the murder rate by 6/day in California; lives that Mike Reynolds feels personally responsible for saving. Gladwell then pulls out his inverted-U graph to disprove what Reynolds thinks he has achieved and even suggests that the Three Strikes Law has made crime worse. While I also think that the over-incarceration of Americans is a social ill, and don't think that petty crimes should count towards a Three Strikes Law, the man who murdered Kimber Reynolds was a repeat violent offender who would have been off the streets if the law had been put into place earlier; this read to me as an unfair statistical manipulation that served to attack a still grieving parent. This section ends when Gladwell demurs from Reynolds' offer to show the author the spot where his daughter was murdered -- it's like we're supposed to come to some conclusion from this scene about what kind of a person the father is (obsessed and a little ghoulish) and what kind of a person the author is (professional and not ghoulish), even though Gladwell had been warned (and warns us) that the offer would be coming. I felt icky after reading this part.
But again, I did enjoy reading this book because each of the stories is interesting and well told -- it is only on reflection that the unifying theme seems to fall apart or lose significance. I also have to note this review that includes a refutation of a theory from one of Gladwell's earlier books, Outliers: The Story of Success. In that book, Gladwell describes the "iron law of Canadian hockey": Because the minor leagues are sorted by the birth dates of the players, the NHL is mostly made up of athletes who were born in the first few months of the calendar year. This was fascinating to me when I first read it because I have a young nephew, Ethan, who is an incredible hockey player, but he was born at the end of November, and even his parents agree that it's unlikely that he will be streamed into the elite leagues once he reaches adolescence and his physical size begins to really lag behind peers who can be nearly a year older. Included in that review, however, is a research paper that shows that late babies like my nephew -- those who are underdogs and have to work that much harder to compete against their peers -- actually make up the ranks of the elite NHL players. This information would have added to the points that Gladwell was trying to make in this book and I would have respected the author more if he had included it as an addendum to the "iron law of Canadian hockey".
