When information gets in way.

Byline: Marybeth Jacobson

``Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking'' by Malcolm Gladwell; Little, Brown ($25.95)

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Too much information can be a burden, as anyone who's waded through a seemingly endless list of e-mails after a vacation can attest. In "Blink," Malcolm Gladwell proposes that some of this extraneous information is self-inflicted, taken in as a result of our societal conditioning to gather as much information as possible before making a decision. We're taught not to judge a book by its cover, to look before we leap, that haste makes waste.

"We live in a world that assumes that the quality of a decision is directly …