Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
By Malcolm Gladwell
Published by Little, Brown, 2005
Reviewed by Paul Dorsey for The Nation

If Malcolm Gladwell were to review his own book, it might begin like this: There is a small book, just under 300 pages actually, with a creamy white cover and a lower-case title of the sort that seems so trendy to the Manhattan literati lately, that has just arrived from Little, Brown and Co on Madison Avenue, just a few short blocks from Union Square.
Right across the street from the world’s most celebrated purveyors of sesame seed bagels, a place called Jerry’s with wide tinted windows and humourless waiters, this is, of course, the New York publishing house that has handled over the years such witty luminaries as Willie Friedland, who writes so scathingly about metropolitan environmental issues, and Mary Smythe-Sangster, the celebrity hunter who famously called Cher a has-been.
The book is by a half-American, half-Jamaican reporter for The New Yorker who goes by the name of Malcolm Gladwell. Somewhere in his late 30s, Gladwell has that not-quite-dignified, not-quite-condescending look in his eyes, beneath his curly locks above a receding forehead, that suggests a man who has yet to find his way in the grand world he writes about. This is, of course, quite understandable when you consider the fact that for the first 12 years of his life he suffered from the effects of Tweed syndrome …
And on he would go, quite likely, for many more paragraphs. One is expected to maintain one’s attention until he gets around to The Heart of the Matter, in this case what the damn book is about and is it any good.
In Gladwell’s second bestseller (his first was “The Tipping Point”), there’s a chapter segment subtitled “The Storytelling Problem”, but presumably you’re not supposed to smirk when you see it, for Gladwell clearly considers himself a raconteur extraordinaire.
And I suppose this approach – a rambling, nuanced introduction to set the scene before you get to the nut, so to speak – has its secure place in the annals of contemporary self-help/popular psychology literature.
Anyone who’s attended a seminar on Making A Million In Head Bump Divination will have endured or been thrilled by, depending on their level of gullibility, a typical, drawn-out discourse by an overpaid “expert” about how when he was a kid his dog died and blah blah blah and much later that’s how he made his first Million.
Inspirational, some people call it. I think it’s a crock, a stage magician’s diversionary patter, a sure sign that there’s little if any substance to the production, and Malcolm Gladwell, God bless him and his grinning accountant, has apparently made a Million by padding out into two books what would be a pair of interesting 1,000-word feature stories in The New Yorker.
On to the nut, then, at long last.
If you’re having trouble thinking, are a speed reader and really do enjoy circuitous, red-herring-intensive shaggy-dog stories, even if they’re not funny, you might want to have a go at “Blink”.
If you’re thinking of forking out the dough just because you’re curious to learn what Gladwell means by “the power of thinking without thinking”, I’ll save you the money (sorry, Asia Books). Here’s the whole volume in what I consider a generous 16 words: More often that you would expect, your very first impression of something if the most accurate.
That’s it.
Trust that first impression, Gladwell repeats (often), that first blink of an eye – it works because the subconscious is excellent at sussing a situation long before you even begin to consciously grasp the elements and begin the process of weighing one option against another.
The rest of the book is tedious tales of people experiencing this phenomenon and either succeeding mightily because they stuck with their first impression or ruing the day they didn’t. Along the way there are people researching it – as an application it’s called “thin slicing” – so you get some psychological backup, but otherwise it’s just let’s-go-for-a-long-walk anecdotes.
Thomas Hoving, the influential New York art critic, opens and closes the book. In the first chapter, which is more an exhaustive course on kouros (nude male sculptures from ancient Greece, apparently) than anything else, he’s one of the shrewd experts who discern in a blink that the expensive one on sale is a fake.
In the last chapter, he’s having his secretary stash the artworks under consideration in odd places like his cloakroom so he’ll have surprise encounters with them and be able to judge them spontaneously.
So you can learn about kouros, and why women can’t be professional trombonists, and even how to trick the American military in a war game. But other than this, “Blink” is ponderous puffery. That’s it.