*Starred Review* Gladwell's best-sellers, such as The Tipping Point (2000) and Outliers (2008), have changed the way we think about sociological changes and the factors that contribute to high levels of success. Here he examines and challenges our concepts of advantage and disadvantage in a way that may seem intuitive to some and surprising to others. Beginning with the classic tale of David and Goliath and moving through history with figures such as Lawrence of Arabia and Martin Luther King Jr., Gladwell shows how, time and again, players labeled underdog use that status to their advantage and prevail through the elements of cunning and surprise. He also shows how certain academic advantages, such as getting into an Ivy League school, have downsides, in that being a big fish in a small pond at a less prestigious school can lead to greater confidence and a better chance of success in later life. Gladwell even promotes the idea of a desirable difficulty, such as dyslexia, a learning disability that causes much frustration for reading students but, at the same time, may force them to develop better listening and creative problem-solving skills. As usual, Gladwell presents his research in a fresh and easy-to-understand context, and he may have coined the catchphrase of the decade, Use what you got. --Siegfried, David Copyright 2010 Booklist

New Yorker staff writer Gladwell (Tipping Point; What the Dog Saw) argues that what may appear to be the obvious answer to questions may not be so obvious. For instance: Do smaller classroom sizes mean students will have higher grades and test scores? Has California's Three Strikes law lowered crime in that state? He compares the biblical story of David and Goliath (the battle between the underdog and the giant) to events from everyday life that question how people think about disadvantages and obstacles. Through extensive research and interviews, he analyzes the pluses and minuses of classroom size and university selection. He discusses the theory of "desirable difficulty" from the perspective of civil rights leaders, cancer researchers, and dyslexics, as well as the limits of power after losing a loved one to a tragic event. -VERDICT A thought-provoking book that makes readers consider what's below the surface and investigate deeper into what goes on in our day-to-day lives and in the world at large. Recommended for anyone who wants to learn how to examine facts in an alternative manner, as well as undergraduate and graduate students, scholars, and researchers studying psychology, sociology, and history.-Tina Chan, SUNY Oswego (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A far- and free-ranging meditation on the age-old struggle between underdogs and top dogs. Beginning with the legendary matchup between the Philistine giant and the scrawny shepherd boy of the title, New Yorker scribe Gladwell (What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures, 2009, etc.) returns continually to his main theme: that there are unsung advantages to being disadvantaged and overlooked disadvantages to being "advantaged." Though the book begins like a self-help manual--an early chapter on a middle school girl's basketball team that devastated more talented opponents with a gritty, full-court press game seems to suggest a replicable strategy, at least in basketball, and a later one shows how it's almost patently easier to accomplish more by being a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big pond--it soon becomes clear that Gladwell is not interested in simple formulas or templates for success. He aims to probe deeply into the nature of underdog-ness and explore why top dogs have long had such trouble with underdogs--in scholastic and athletic competitions, in the struggle for success or renown in all professions, and in insurgencies and counterinsurgencies the world over. Telling the stories of some amazingly accomplished people, including superlawyer David Boies, IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad, and childhood-leukemia researcher Jay Freireich, Gladwell shows that deficits one wouldn't wish on anyone, like learning disabilities or deprived childhoods, can require a person to adapt to the world in ways that later become supreme benefits in professional life. On the other hand, children of the newly wealthy who have had every good fortune their parents lacked tend to become less well-equipped to deal with life's random but inevitable challenges. In addition to the top-notch writing one expects from a New Yorker regular, Gladwell rewards readers with moving stories, surprising insights and consistently provocative ideas.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

TO JUDGE BY "David and Goliath," Malcolm Gladwell's favorite word is "we." In fact, it's been his favorite word since his first book, "The Tipping Point," launched his enormously successful career writing about how the world doesn't necessarily work the way "we" think it does. His book "Outliers" was about (among other things) how success requires ingredients that are different from ones "we" normally assume - to wit, talent counts for far less than hard work, luck and background. Before that, "Blink" proposed that one's first impression turns out to be right surprisingly often - contrary to the belief many of "us" hold. And "David and Goliath"? It's about the advantages of disadvantages - and the disadvantages of seeming advantages. Or, as Gladwell puts it: "We have a definition in our heads of what an advantage is - and the definition isn't right. And what happens as a result? It means that we make mistakes. It means that we misread battles between underdogs and giants. It means that we underestimate how much freedom there can be in what looks like a disadvantage." The "we" of course does not include Gladwell. That's the whole point of a Malcolm Gladwell book. He has delved into the literature; he has interviewed lots of people - scientists, economists, deep thinkers and others who wind up in the book - and he has divined meaning and found counterintuitive connections that would otherwise elude the rest of us. Those connections can be quite dizzying. In "David and Goliath," Gladwell links people who are dyslexic with a hero of the civil rights movement and the citizens of London during the blitz. According to him, they all managed to turn disadvantages into advantages. On the flip side - those whose advantages aren't so advantageous after all - include students who are not at the top of their Ivy League classes, teachers of extremely small classes and very wealthy parents. As always, Gladwell's sweep is breathtaking, and thought-provoking. What it is not, however, is entirely convincing. You don't have to be a knee-jerk contrarian to realize that there is a good deal of common sense in Gladwell's thesis. It's just that it's not always as counterintuitive as he makes it out to be. When he writes about the actual example of David and Goliath, he makes the point that David - quick and accurate with the slingshot - was in fact the one with the advantage over Goliath, who was "too big and slow and blurry-eyed to comprehend the way the tables had been turned." "All these years," he adds, "we've been telling these kinds of stories wrong." But have we really? It strikes me that many Americans already understand the advantages of the seeming underdog, thanks in part to an example that Gladwell does not include: the way America's immense military power could not win the Vietnam War, or tame Iraq and Afghanistan. Smilarly, Gladwell devotes a chapter to people with dyslexia, making the point that the skills they nurture to compensate for their condition can sometimes lead to a life of extraordinary accomplishment. He cites a study - and Gladwell always seems to find the perfect study - by a researcher at City University London that purports to show that "somewhere around a third" of all successful entrepreneurs are dyslexic. (One of Gladwell's prime examples is David Boies, the wellknown lawyer; my wife works for his firm.) But this insight about those with dyslexia also strikes me as fairly common knowledge, documented at least anecdotally in recent years. On the other hand, one of the most unconventional theories in "David and Goliath" is that for certain people, losing a parent early in life can be an advantage. He cites the work of Marvin Eisenstadt, a psychologist who did a study showing that "of the 573 eminent people for whom Eisenstadt could find reliable biographical information, a quarter had lost at least one parent before the age of 10" - and 45 percent had lost a parent before the age of 20. The central figure Gladwell leans on to make this case is a doctor named Emil J. Freireich, who made extraordinary advances against childhood leukemia. The section about Freireich is where Gladwell really starts making the kinds of connections he is famous for. It also illustrates the book's primary shortcomings. The chapter starts with Freireich's childhood, which was marked by his father's presumed suicide. Then it cuts to the blitz - the eight months of German bombing raids on London during World War II - to alight on a curious fact: up to 40,000 people were killed and 50,000 injured in the attacks, but to the surprise of the British government, people didn't panic; many, in fact, simply went about their lives. For Gladwell's purposes, this puzzle is best explained by J. T. MacCurdy, a Canadian psychiatrist who posited that because most people did not experience a bomb going off very close to them, they weren't traumatized; instead they experienced "excitement with a flavor of invulnerability." MacCurdy called this group "remote misses." And what do remote misses have to do with Freireich's extraordinary achievements? Although it takes a while to get there - with further crosscutting into dyslexia, the life of the civil rights activist Fred L. Shuttlesworth and the work Freireich did on children who had leukemia, putting them through hell to find ways to save them - the answer appears to be that sometimes people who lose a parent early in life can be categorized as remote misses. Their difficult childhoods ultimately give them strengths that many of us lack. On the other hand, Gladwell also acknowledges that many others who lose a parent early on "are crushed by what they have been through." But isn't that like saying, "Whatever doesn't kill us makes us stronger"? Some people overcome difficulties. Others don't. Gladwell can't really say why Dr. Freireich is in the former category and not the latter. The best he can do is say that "we as a society need people who have emerged from some kind of trauma," like Freireich, even though that means that many others who have experienced trauma will not recover the way he did. To which the reader is likely to respond, "And...?" I'VE LONG ADMIRED Gladwell's work in The New Yorker, which employs many of the same literary techniques but is more persuasive, perhaps, because it is more contained and less ambitious. "David and Goliath," on the other hand, is at once deeply repetitive and a bewildering sprawl. There are chapters, especially toward the end, whose relation to the rest of the book are hard to ascertain, even with his constant guidance. Maybe what "David and Goliath" really illustrates is that it's time for Malcolm Gladwell to find a new shtick. 'We have a definition in our heads of what an advantage is - and the definition isn't right.' JOE NOCERA is an Op-Ed columnist for The Times.