David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants is the latest book by Malcolm Gladwell, author of “Outliers,” “The Tipping Point” and other nonfiction works. If you’re already familiar with Gladwell, then you know he is a creative thinker, and a controversial one. In this book, he starts with the legend of David and Goliath, but he does not challenge the reality of that encounter. Rather, he analyzes how David understood that he was not facing long odds against Goliath. It was the others, the Philistines and King Solomon alike who misunderstood the nature of the encounter, which as David understood, was favorable to him. Gladwell explains, “Through these stories, I want to explore two ideas. The first is that much of what we consider valuable in our world arises out of these kinds of lopsided conflicts, because the act of facing overwhelming odds produces greatness and beauty. And second, that we consistently get these kinds of conflicts wrong. We misread them. We misinterpret them. Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness.”

Gladwell’s stories in support of his thesis are wide ranging (and well written), from 12-year-old girls basketball strategy, to the advantages of dyslexia, to the England’s failure to quell the Troubles in Northern Ireland, to the civil rights movement in the U.S., to the resistance movement in Vichy France during WWII, to why some students would be better off going to a middle range university than accepting enrollment at one of the Ivies, and more. He may present only anecdotal information, but his data and arguments are thought provoking with regard to the way most of us tend to analyze the world around us. This book is absolutely worth reading and it gets my strongest recommendation.