“David and Goliath is a book about what happens when ordinary people confront giants…from armies and mighty warriors to disability, misfortune, and oppression.”

The story of David and Goliath is well known, of course: a huge giant challenges any man of the Israeli army to single combat, all soldiers refuse in fear, young shepherd boy accepts and defeats giant with only a sling. The classic underdog story. Gladwell takes another perspective: the biblical tale matches the symptoms of acromegaly, a condition which leads to enormous growth, but also impairs vision. That explains why Goliath needed an attendant to lead him to battle, and why he did not respond to David having a sling: he couldn’t see! What gave the giant his great size, Gladwell argues, was also his greatest weakness.

The point, Gladwell argues, is a general one. We tend to assume that great strength will always win out, but in truth, underdogs can gain considerable strength from their underdog status, while giants can be severely disadvantaged by their size. The battle is much less one-sided than we might believe.

Gladwell applies this idea to issues ranging from dyslexia to class sizes and university choice. As usual, his examples are interesting and fun, which is what makes the book work. It’s less clear to me, though, what his thesis means. One concern is that perhaps adverse conditions just destroy the weak: though the idea of hardship as crucible is popular (and I find it personally appealing), it’s hard to disentangle that theory from the idea that hardship just destroys the weak and identifies the already strong as survivors.

Perhaps more significantly, however, he’s also vague on the concept of hardship. At one point, for example, he suggests that students would be better off going to a worse university, so they can be a big fish in a small pond: after all, the same number of students drop out of science at Harvard as at much lower ranked universities (which, by the way, if fascinating), but the worst students at Harvard are potentially stronger than the best at a weaker university. If one chooses a small pond, however, or equally chooses to hardship when it could have been avoided, is that still the same? It seems to me it is not: knowingly choosing to make things difficult for yourself, though potentially valuable, is likely not the same as being forced to undergo adversity. If adversity strengthens, too, one wonders what choosing a little pond does to your future potential.

All that said, I liked the book more that Outliers, and find his thesis appealing. We probably are too fixed in our conceptions of what is weak and what is strong, and we should realize that there is strength in overcoming and adapting to weakness, not just avoiding it.