In the twinkling of an eye: Malcolm Gladwell tops best-seller lists with a stealth approach to race. His books probe the way fads catch fire and the mind's ability to process fact and prejudice quickly

Throughout Blink, Gladwell spins scintillating yarns from an array of situations--World War II code breaking, marriage counseling, speed dating, medical malpractice, an honest car salesman, hitting topspin forehands--to explain how rapid cognition works.

Though he didn't grow up playing the dozens on the boulevard--"I don't come from a storytelling tradition. My family is incredibly reserved," he says--he came by his skills honestly. Thirty years ago, his mother, Joyce Gladwell, wrote a memoir about growing up in Jamaica and moving to England in the 1950s. Brown Face, Big Master (MacMillan Caribbean, May 2004; and first published in 1969) is now considered a Caribbean classic.

"Her book was the first book I ever remember reading closely, and it really inspired me," he says. "She is a beautifully simple and clear writer. There is no wasted motion or unnecessary word, and that's the way I try to write as well."

The Science of Thought

While lauding Gladwell's storytelling chops, many reviewers critique Blink as failing to formulate a comprehensive theory that unifies these delightful, if disparate, anecdotes. Conservative commentator David Brooks writes in The New York Times Book Review: "Gladwell never tells us how the brain performs these amazing cognitive feats; we just get the scattered by products of the mysterious backstage process." Kevin Shapiro, a research fellow in neuroscience at Harvard Medical School, writes in Commentary that Blink is a messy mix of "false analogies and buzzwords"; "The idea seems to be that a diverse set of phenomena--from the gut feelings of experts to the biases of everyday life--are instances of the same kind of thought."

Critics are so fascinated with the exact science behind Blink because it's part of a wave of recent literature on brain chemistry that promises to revolutionize our understanding of the unconscious mind like nothing has since Freud. That they fail to grasp, however, is Gladwell's conscious agenda of using science not simply for science's sake, but to understand and transform, a society.

"Blink is quite explicitly a political work--or, rather, a book that is interested in initiating social change," Gladwell told BIBR, after his extensive Blink book tour earlier this year. For Gladwell, if his writing "is not trying to change people's beliefs or behavior or opinions, then what is the point?"

His agenda may be explicit, but his approach is not. Gladwell understands that in this conservative political moment, Americans are weary and wary of discussing racial prejudice. Therefore, Blink deploys a stealth attack, detailing the dynamics of unconscious bias by discussing how we respond as a society to physical attributes less volatile than skin color. "I chose things like height" Gladwell says, "because I felt that they were more subtle and more acceptable ways of getting people to take unconscious bias seriously." For instance, those who suggest social discrimination is over might rethink that presumption when confronted with the weird fact that, in addition to being disproportionately white and male, 58 percent of corporate CEOs are six feet or taller, even though only 14.5 percent of adult American men are taller than six feet.