How to write a book review
Posted on December 19, 2008 - Filed Under College | Leave a Comment
While I initially had great plans to spend my Christmas holidays reading Diderot, Dostoyevsky and Voltaire (in between vigorous carousing and energetic wassailing), my wicked med school decided to ruin Christmas for everyone and gave us books to review. The choices all suck, but Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point seems like the best of a bad lot to me, mainly because I remember seeing him on the Colbert Report twice, and so I figure his books have got to hold some kind of general appeal.
General appeal is obviously not universal appeal however, and Clive Crook at The Atlantic is not impressed.
Since the first chapter of “Tipping Point” I have been enduring Gladwell out of an increasingly weary sense of professional obligation. This is what they pay me to do, I tell myself. The man has a nose for interesting tales, I grant you, but his unfailing combination of intellectual parasitism, credulity, false modesty, and self-importance repels me. In “Tipping Point”, “Blink” and those of his New Yorker pieces I have read, the formula is always the same: find a scholarly opinion; sanctify said opinion with Gladwellian approval (transforming it from a disputed theory to something “we now know”); season with Madison Avenue terms of art; then deluge with anecdotes of questionable, if any, relevance. And let there be color. Always, the color. Please tell me about that man’s wry smile, interesting foreign accent, and cluttered desk (often, as studies show, the sign of a creative mind). I need to know all that.
Crook then proceeds to give Gladwell’s latest book Outliers a jolly good hammering based on David Brooks’ review of it (Crook admits that he has yet it himself, which I suppose somewhat undermines his takedown’s validity, but doesn’t make it any less enjoyable).
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