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Do you like reading short case studies of interesting historical events. I am happy to report that I was not.This book is well organized as the author takes you through various case studies and research experiments. Are you interested in how the mind works. If your answer is yes to any of the above, this book is for you.This book was recommended to me by one of my professors in my MSW program. Indeed, for me to fully grasp the concepts, I plan to re-read it when I have more time to ponder the ideas and someone to discuss it with. Do you have to make quick decisions under pressure. Because I had high expectations, I was worried that I would be let down.
More than once I stopped in the middle of a chapter to write down a term, person, or website to look up online. Do you ever wonder why people do what they do. The logic was easy of me to follow and his style of writing kept me entertained. Are you interested in music, art, politics, or psychology. I have been wanting to read it since then and just barely picked it up from the library. This is a book I could enjoy reading over and over again. This would make an excellent choice for a book club.
I didn't care for this book much--certainly not as much as I did the author's previous Tipping Point. At other times it may only result in discrimination against female musicians or black pedestrians. These are issues that have been studied for the last couple of hundred years, yet Gladwell doesn't cite a single source in his book and doesn't seem to have read a very much on the topic. Ostensibly, it's about the power of the unconscious in judgment. It reads quickly and is a best-seller anyways. But there's no Freud in there (neither Siggie nor Anna) except an interesting quote that a reader of the first edition sent him that Gladwell stuffed into the "Afterward." There's also no Butler (who wrote several books on unconscious memory--including one entitled Unconscious Memory) and no William James, who discusses the nature and power of unconscious thought very interestingly in Varieties of Religious Experience as well as in his massive Psychology. This one seemed no more than a bunch of magazine articles strung together, with no over-arching vision or even a unifying thesis. But Gladwell knows neither when it should be trusted, nor how it knows what he thinks it sometimes knows.
In fact, Gladwell doesn't seem very widely read in this subject at all: he just goes the interviewer route here, talking to loosely connected "experts" from a wide variety of fields (from battle strategy to auditioning violinists) and then making a half-hearted effort to pull their comments together--all with no any cohesive theory. Sometimes the "blink judgment" is desirable (as when a tennis pro can tell when a server will double fault on his next serve or when an art historian can tell a fraud immediately with little or no examination). But well, why should he. Besides, Gladwell's got his next golden goose to think about.
My waking eyes have been opened to what my subconscious has already seen. This book brought to light the fact that our subconscious operates at a much faster speed than our conscious minds and that it's our conscious that often trips us up during problem solving. I think this notion aligns perfectly with suggestions promoted many leaders such as, "go with your heart," and "trust your instincts." Overall, I thought is was a great read.
We received the book as promised in 2 days and it was in great condition.
It is comprises a spectrum of anecdotes about how people think before they start "thinking." Gladwell has taken a narrow psychological topic and turned it into a thrilling page-turner. Nevermind the armchair critics, the nitpicking ninnies, and the wannabe eggheads who pooh-pooh this book. "Blink" is a powerful book. Most important, "Blink" has changed the way that I think. Few books do that.
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