Blink is the latest book by Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point.  I can confidently say that anyone who enjoyed The Tipping Point will enjoy this one just as much because it is very similar.

Gladwell’s books could almost be called ‘high concept‘ books in that the theme can be very easily explained in a sentence or so, with the book just developing, supporting and expanding on that theme.

There have been acres of newsprint devoted to how Malcolm Gladwell is an inspirational thinker, and how his books can change your outlook, so it must be true.  His special talent lies not in being original (just look at the books and studies quoted in the bibliographies to see how many people were working and writing in these areas) but in pulling together many different and varied studies and connecting them while making them accessible.

I think that Gladwell, like Stephen Jay Gould , Ian Stewart or Roger Penrose is one of the great popularisers of science – he even does it so that you might not even think of it all as science.  If anything he is even more down-to-Earth than Gould: his folksy style verges on the annoying and is probably ripe for parody but the subject matter is compelling enough to make up for it.  And perhaps that very folksiness (with little character sketches and descriptions of anyone he has interviewed) are what humanises the writing.

Just like with The Tipping Point,  the real treat for us laymen is getting the interesting results of a large number of studies and experiments without having to wade through all the dry academic publications they are in, and there are some fascinating studies inside this book.

As each new study is discussed, all the previous ones are mentioned to re-inforce the point. By the end it does feel a bit like one of those drinking songs where you have to repeat everything before adding a new bit – or like the Twelve Days Of Christmas carol!  But it works.

Towards the end, the book gets very interesting for the British reader, and for reasons which were probably unintended.  The book was first published in the US in 2005, so I am guessing it was written before July 2005, and before Jean Charles de Menendes was shot in Stockwell, which makes the last proper chapter all the more remarkable.

It describes a police shooting in New York in 1999, and examines some of the possible reasons why an unarmed man in the street was shot by police with 41 rounds being fired by 4 police officers. Drawing on several sources on top of those quoted earlier in the book it contains some quite plausible explanations, and in the post-Stockwell context it is impossible to read without wondering how some of those explanations may or may not have applied here.

Included in them is the worrying, but neutrally stated, fact of subconscious racial bias in even the least racially prejudiced person. (Something which can be seen at this site)

On a lighter note, some of the examples of experiments where subjects were subconciously conditioned to act in particular ways give a tiny glimpse of how someone like Derren Brown can persuade his subjects to, for example, rob a bank.

The book is worth reading just for the insights into sex discrimination in classical music at the end of the book and the depressing implications for racial inequalities elsewhere – especially on page 56.