Welcome!
Hello everyone and welcome to our new form of communication. From now on, you can find information like our next meeting time, the next book for discussion, suggestions for items to bring, pictures, and highlights of discussion on this page. You can also feel free to post book suggestions of your own, offer to host, and make any other comments/posts on this site. To begin, thank you everyone for coming and making yesterday a great success. Our next meeting will be Saturday, February 7 at 6:30 pm at the Litvak home, unless anyone else would like to host. Two books under consideration for discussion are Saturday by Ian McEwan and Nowhere Man by Aleksandar Hemon. Feel free to offer any other suggestions. The choice will be finalized by the end of the week. For now, here are some pictures from last night.
Comments
Amazon.com Review
Blink is about the first two seconds of looking--the decisive glance that knows in an instant. Gladwell, the best-selling author of The Tipping Point, campaigns for snap judgments and mind reading with a gift for translating research into splendid storytelling. Building his case with scenes from a marriage, heart attack triage, speed dating, choking on the golf course, selling cars, and military maneuvers, he persuades readers to think small and focus on the meaning of "thin slices" of behavior. The key is to rely on our "adaptive unconscious"--a 24/7 mental valet--that provides us with instant and sophisticated information to warn of danger, read a stranger, or react to a new idea.
Gladwell includes caveats about leaping to conclusions: marketers can manipulate our first impressions, high arousal moments make us "mind blind," focusing on the wrong cue leaves us vulnerable to "the Warren Harding Effect" (i.e., voting for a handsome but hapless president). In a provocative chapter that exposes the "dark side of blink," he illuminates the failure of rapid cognition in the tragic stakeout and murder of Amadou Diallo in the Bronx. He underlines studies about autism, facial reading and cardio uptick to urge training that enhances high-stakes decision-making. In this brilliant, cage-rattling book, one can only wish for a thicker slice of Gladwell's ideas about what Blink Camp might look like.