Beyond the Book: Background information when reading Blink

Beyond the Book

This article relates to Blink

Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer with The New Yorker magazine since 1996. He is the author of two books, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference, (2000) and Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005).

From 1987 to 1996, he was a reporter with the Washington Post, where he covered business, science, and then served as the newspaper's New York City bureau chief. He graduated from the University of Toronto, Trinity College, with a degree in history. He was born in England, grew up in rural Ontario, and now lives in New York City.

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Gladwell got interested in the thinking process behind snap decisions after he (an African American) was stopped by police as a potential rape suspect, even though he was too old, too short and too thin to fit the description. All he had in common with the suspect was dark skin and long curly hair and the officer's snap judgment that he was the guilty party.

Useful link: The excerpt of Blink at BookBrowse contains all 30 pages of Chapter 1. If you want to read even more but don't want to splash out on the book, visit Gladwell's website for three more short but interesting excerpts from later in the book.

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This article relates to Blink. It first ran in the April 5, 2007 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.