Information about the book
About the book
David and Goliath is the dazzling and provocative new book from Malcolm Gladwell, no.1 bestselling author of The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers and What the Dog Saw.
Why do underdogs succeed so much more than we expect? How do the weak outsmart the strong? In David and Goliath Malcolm Gladwell takes us on a scintillating and surprising journey through the hidden dynamics that shape the balance of power between the small and the mighty.
From the conflicts in Northern Ireland, through the tactics of civil rights leaders and the problem of privilege, Gladwell demonstrates how we misunderstand the true meaning of advantage and disadvantage. When does a traumatic childhood work in someone's favour? How can a disability leave someone better off? And do you really want your child to go to the best school he or she can get into?
David and Goliath draws on the stories of remarkable underdogs, history, science, psychology and on Malcolm Gladwell's unparalleled ability to make the connections other miss. It's a brilliant, illuminating book that overturns conventional thinking about power and advantage.
Extract
In 1963, when Martin Luther King came to Birmingham, his movement was in crisis. He had just spent nine months directing protests against segregation in Albany, Georgia, two hundred miles to the south, and he had limped away from Albany without winning any significant concessions. The biggest victory the civil rights movement had won to that point had been the Supreme Court's decision in the famous Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954, declaring segregation of public schools to be unconstitutional. But almost a decade had passed and the public schools of the Deep South were still as racially divided as ever. In the 1940s and early 1950s, most Southern states had been governed by relatively moderate politicians who were at least willing to acknowledge the dignity of black people. Alabama had a governor in those years named 'Big Jim' Folsom, who was fond of saying 'all men are just alike.' By the early sixties, all the moderates were gone. The statehouses were in the control of hard-line segregationists. The South seemed to be moving backwards.
And Birmingham? Birmingham was the most racially divided city in America. It was known as 'the Johannesburg of the South.' When a busload of civil rights activists were on their way to Birmingham, the local police stood by while Klansmen forced their bus to the side of the road and set it afire. Black people who tried to move into white neighborhoods had their homes dynamited by the city's local Ku Klux Klansmen so often that Birmingham's other nickname was Bombingham. 'In Birmingham,' Diane McWhorter writes in Carry Me Home, 'it was held a fact of criminal science that the surest way to stop a crime wave— burglaries, rapes, whatever—was to go out and shoot a few suspects. ('This thing's getting out of hand,' a [police] lieutenant might say. 'You know what we've got to do.')'
Eugene 'Bull' Connor, the city's public safety commissioner, was a short, squat man with enormous ears and a 'bullfrog voice.' He came to prominence in 1938 when a political conference was held in downtown Birmingham with both black and white delegates. Connor tied a long rope to a stake in the lawn outside the auditorium, and ran the rope down the center of the aisle and insisted—in accordance with the city's segregation ordinances—that black people stay to one side of the line, and whites to the other. One of the attendees at the meeting was the president's wife, Eleanor Roosevelt. She was sitting on the 'wrong' side and Connor's people had to force her to move to the white side. (Imagine someone trying that on Michelle Obama.) Connor liked to spend his mornings at the Molton Hotel downtown, doing shots of 100 proof Old Grand-Dad Bourbon, and sayings things like, A Jew is just a 'nigger turned inside out.' People used to tell jokes about Birmingham, of the sort that weren't really jokes: A black man in Chicago wakes up one morning and tells his wife that Jesus had come to him in a dream and told him to go to Birmingham. She is horrified: 'Did Jesus say He'd go with you?' The husband replies: 'He said He'd go as far as Memphis.'
Upon arriving in Birmingham, King called a meeting of his planning team. 'I have to tell you,' he said, 'that in my judgment, some of the people sitting here today will not come back alive from this campaign.' Then he went around the room and gave everyone a mock eulogy. One of King's aides would later admit that he never wanted to go to Birmingham at all: 'When I kissed my wife and children good-bye down on Carol Road in Atlanta, I didn't think I would ever see them again.'
King was outgunned and overmatched. He was the overwhelming underdog. He had, however, an advantage—of the same paradoxical variety as David Boies's dyslexia or Jay Freireich's painful childhood. He was from a community that had always been the underdog. By the time the civil rights crusade came to Birmingham, African-Americans had spent a few hundred years learning how to cope with being outgunned and overmatched. Along the way they had learned a few things about battling giants.
At the center of many of the world's oppressed cultures stands the figure of the 'trickster hero.' In legend and song, he appears in the form of a seemingly innocuous animal that triumphs over others much larger than himself through cunning and guile. In the West Indies, slaves brought with them from Africa tales of a devious spider named Anansi. Among American slaves, the trickster was often the short-tailed Brer Rabbit. 'De rabbit is de slickest o' all de animals de Lawd ever made,' one ex-slave recounted in an interview with folklorists a hundred years ago:
He ain't de biggest, an he ain't de loudest but he sho' am de slickest. If he gits in trouble he gits out by gittin' somebody else in. Once he fell down a deep well an' did he holler and cry? No siree. He set up a mighty mighty whistling and a singin', an' when de wolf passes by he heard him an' he stuck his head over an' de rabbit say, 'Git 'long 'way f'om here. Dere ain't room fur two. Hit's mighty hot up dere and nice an' cool down here. Don' you git in dat bucket an' come down here.' Dat made de wolf all de mo' onrestless and he jumped into the bucket an' as he went down de rabbit come up, an' as dey passed de rabbit he laughed an' he say, 'Dis am life; some go up and some go down.'
In the most famous Brer Rabbit story, Brer Fox traps Rabbit by building a baby doll out of tar. Brer Rabbit tries to engage the tar baby and instead gets stuck, and the more he tries to free himself from the tar, the more hopelessly entangled he becomes. 'I don't care what you do wid' me, Brer Fox,' Rabbit pleads to the gloating Fox, 'but don't fling me in dat briar-patch.' Brer Fox, of course, does just that—and Rabbit, who was born and bred in the briar patch, uses the thorns to separate himself from the doll and escapes. Fox is defeated. Rabbit sits cross-legged on a nearby log, triumphantly 'koamin' de pitch outen his har wid a chip.'
Trickster tales were wish fulfillments in which slaves dreamed of one day rising above their white masters. But as the historian Lawrence Levine writes, they were also 'painfully realistic stories which taught the art of surviving and even triumphing in the face of a hostile environment.' African-Americans were outnumbered and overpowered, and the idea embedded in the Brer Rabbit stories was that the weak could compete in even the most lopsided of contests if they were willing to use their wits. Brer Rabbit understood Brer Fox in a way that Brer Fox did not understand himself. He realized his opponent Fox was so malicious that he couldn't resist giving Rabbit the punishment Rabbit said he desperately wanted to avoid. So Rabbit tricked Fox, gambling that he could not bear the thought that a smaller and lesser animal was enjoying himself so much. Levine argues that over the course of their long persecution, African-Americans took the lessons of the trickster to heart.
The records left by nineteenth-century observers of slavery and by the masters themselves indicate that a significant number of slaves lied, cheated, stole, feigned illness, loafed, pretended to misunderstand the orders they were given, put rocks in the bottom of their cotton baskets in order to meet their quota, broke their tools, burned their masters' property, mutilated themselves in order to escape work, took indifferent care of the crops they were cultivating, and mistreated the livestock placed in their care to the extent that masters often felt it necessary to use the less efficient mules rather than horses since the former could better withstand the brutal treatment of the slaves.
Dyslexics compensate for their disability by developing other skills that—at times— can prove highly advantageous. Being bombed or orphaned can be a near-miss experience and leave you devastated. Or it can be a remote miss and leave you stronger. These are David's opportunities: the occasions in which difficulties, paradoxically, turn out to be desirable. The lesson of the trickster tales is the third desirable difficulty: the unexpected freedom that comes from having nothing to lose. The trickster gets to break the rules.
The executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization led by King, was Wyatt Walker. Walker was on the ground in Birmingham from the beginning, marshaling King's meager army against the forces of racism and reaction. King and Walker were under no illusions that they could fight racism the conventional way. They could not defeat Bull Connor at the polls, or in the streets, or in the court of law. They could not match him strength for strength. What they could do, though, was play Brer Rabbit and try to get Connor to throw them in the briar patch.
'Wyatt,' King said, 'you've got to find the means to create a crisis, to make Bull Connor tip his hand.'
