Malcolm Gladwell, at Symphony Hall, 8 p.m., Wednesday, Jan. 29. Tickets start at $45 and include a copy of "David & Goliath," signed by Gladwell on the night of the event; tickets available at A Cappella Books in Inman Park, 208 Haralson Ave. NE (at the corner of Dekalb Ave), at acappellabooks.com and at the Woodruff Arts Center Box Office, woodruffcenter.org. Information: Arts Center: 404-733-4200; A Cappella Books: 404-681-5128; www.acappellabooks.com/
One of the things Goliaths have learned since the first millennium, B.C., is that great stature attracts slings and arrows.
Certainly Canadian transplant Malcolm Gladwell, creator of a new genre of pop-academic best-sellers, has the bumps to prove it.
One of the few nonfiction writers who can fill a 2,500-seat auditorium with adoring fans, Gladwell will mostly be pelted with bouquets Wednesday, Jan. 29, when he speaks at Symphony Hall about his new book, “David and Goliath.”
But the book has attracted its share of fusillades.
Like his 2000 debut best-seller, “Tipping Point,” and the string of successes since then (including “Blink” and “Outliers”) “David and Goliath” uses contemporary narratives and academic research to support a counter-intuitive theme — in this case, the idea that underdogs frequently have strengths invisible to the strong, and that setbacks, such as learning disabilities or early tragedies, can be blessings in disguise.
This is, of course, the comforting moral that Hollywood loves best, deployed in movies from “Star Wars” to “Rocky.” The New Republic sniffs that Gladwell writes “fairy tales” and calls his books “analgesics for those who seek temporary relief from abiding anxiety.”
Gladwell takes those missiles in stride. “If you’ve been successful, you attract, maybe appropriately, a higher level of scrutiny,” says the curly-haired writer, a member of the staff at the New Yorker magazine since 1996.
But even his critics grant Gladwell’s ability to spot patterns in disparate events and to marshal persuasive evidence for his conclusions.
His central image is Goliath, dressed out in 100 pounds of armor, brandishing a sword, shield and spear. Goliath appeared an unbeatable man-mountain. But he wasn’t. Like many pituitary cases, he probably suffered from acromegaly, which brought with it vision problems. In other words, he was a slow-moving, half-blind, sitting duck, for anyone with a rock and a sling.
Other seemingly over-matched underdogs — civil rights protesters in Birmingham; a group of basketball-playing nerds in Silicon Valley; Catholics in Northern Ireland — are examined in the book. They succeed, Gladwell writes, because they play to their own strengths and correctly assess their opponents’ weaknesses.
Gladwell recently spoke about his book from his Manhattan home.
Q: Is the message of this story that the meek will inherit the earth?
A: This is in no way intended to be a kind of apology for social or economic or political inequity. It's more like a warning … if you are in a position of authority and you do not treat those who have less status than you with respect … then you are courting trouble."
Q: How did Wyatt Walker and Martin Luther King Jr. use the strength of weakness in 1963 in Birmingham?
A: Their campaign was at a crossroads, things were not going well. They were getting attacked within their own community, they couldn't get anybody to march. Because they were at the bottom, they had more freedom, they had nothing to lose. That opened up a world of possibilities.
Q: Including marching with children.
A: At the time using children was profoundly controversial.
Q: What made King and Walker suited to this fight?
A: I picked up this same theme in my chapter on the Huguenots (a Protestant sect persecuted in France). When people have had an experience over time with oppression and deprivation, those that survive become formidable opponents.
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