The reasoning in ‘Outliers,’ which consists of cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies, had me gnawing on my Kindle. Fortunately for ‘What the Dog Saw,’ the essay format is a better showcase for Gladwell’s talents, because the constraints of length and editors yield a higher ratio of fact to fancy. Readers have much to learn from Gladwell the journalist and essayist. But when it comes to Gladwell the social scientist, they should watch out for those igon values.
Steven Pinker's take down of Gladwell had me gnawing on my Sunday Times (not really, and if I was, it would have been in a good way). But check out Christopher Niemann's excellent illustration above. Lest you think the Grey Lady is picking on Gladwell, here is what Clancy Martin says about Paul Auster's recent works:
I was not a fan of Auster’s last few books. “Invisible” is his 15th novel, and I was afraid that this would be, as I felt with his recent work, another instance of Auster playing Auster — a kind of arch exercise in the clever but cloying metaphysics of textual irony, a cat-and-mouse toying with the fiction and the reader reminiscent of German Romanticism and falling victim to what both Hegel and Kierkegaard called “infinite absolute negativity” (this attack on the German Romantics was one of the few times those two were ever in agreement). One leaves the text and feels that one has been left with nothing. The irony vacuums out the content and, with it, our interest. Like the ouroboros, the ancient symbol of a dragon swallowing its own tail, the book consumes itself, and disappears.
Invisible, however, is hailed as "the finest novel Paul Auster has ever written."
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