Book Review: David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants
I've read about half of Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers and just never got around to finishing it. Mostly because I didn't buy the audio version and got the Kindle version. I do plan on getting back to it one day, but until then I picked up his latest, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants.
In a lot of ways David and Goliath is a lot like its title, its a battle of two very different pieces. The first half of David of Goliath is excellent. The stories are engaging and the theme stays close to Gladwell's main thesis. The second half of David and Goliath doesn't seem to follow the same tightly constructed argument. Gladwell seems to go off on tangents and only at the end of his examples does he try and make an parallels to the underdog.
I really did enjoy David and Goliath but will have been far more impressed had the book remained as good as its first handful of chapters. The idea that David might not have been an underdog was fascinating and I would have liked to have seen that explored more then the diversions that happen later in the book. All things being equal I thought David and Goliath was an extremely entertaining read but not one I would want to go back to.