Could dyslexia be an advantage? How about childhood trauma? or religious persecution? David and Goliath is an exploration of the ways in which humans fail to calculate where true power lies, as the Philistines did in the Bible story of the title. Using the narrative of a preteen girls' basketball team of inexperienced players whose coach, from India, knew nothing about the game, Gladwell explores what really constitutes strength and weakness. In the case of the basketball team, by analyzing the game and weighing up the skill sets of his players, the coach brought his rag-tag team to the national championships by exploiting the weaknesses of their more skilled opponents through the continuous and energetic use of the full-court press.
Gladwell goes on tell us about those who succeeded in other arenas not by playing better but by playing harder or differently: a pediatric leukemia specialist whose horrible childhood enabled him to take great risks in pursuit of new treatments, dyslexic men who went on to become successful Hollywood moguls and Wall Street brokers, and a stubborn French Huguenot who fearlessly defied the Nazis. In each case, Gladwell's unique perspective and narrative gifts keep the listener on the edge of her seat.
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