Blink

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For the first 276 pages minus two sentences I did not really enjoy Malcolm Gladwell's Blink.  I enjoyed the other book of his that I read and reviewed, Outliers, so I had high expectations for Blink.  However, what was presented as definitive correlations in Outliers was presented as ambiguous speculation in Blink as Gladwell often sighted examples that both were in favor of and went against the point he appeared to be trying to make.

Essentially, the premise of Blink is that there appears to be some mechanism by which we can subconsciously make highly accurate judgements and therefore better decisions based off of our first initial impression of a situation.  The rest of book is purely examples throughout the course of history of situations in which this has held true, such as judging the authenticity of artwork, as well as situations in which this hasn't held true, such as cops opening fire on a civilian who looked suspicious but was not carrying a weapon or being threatening in any manner.

Very few conclusions are drawn from these examples, and even when they are there are still examples given to discredit the conclusions.

While I read the entire book, it wasn't until I got to the last two sentences that I found value in what Gladwell was saying.  Although there wasn't any science (that I recall) presented to verify his theory, his concluding remarks gave me something to think about and go off and research on my own if I so choose.  But, I will not spoil the ending for you here, so you can go check out what he has to say yourself.

Your body.  Your training.

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