Resources - Blink - and miss the point?. Should we trust our instincts more when assessing data, making decisions based on the blink of an eye? Bobby Pickering reviews Malcolm Gladwell's latest tome.(Book Review)

You're in a bookshop or library looking for a good read. You pick up a book and have minutes to make a judgement. In these circumstances Blink has a lot going for it.

Author Malcolm Gladwell, with his shock of frizzy hair, looks slightly "mad scientist", certainly iconoclastic. He has good pedigree: The Tipping Point was a blockbuster based on a simple premise (that a small change can have dramatically vast consequences).

This book also offers an intriguing paradox: "The power of Thinking without Thinking!" Of course it's all intriguing, so you must have it.

Unfortunately, you can't judge a book by its cover, and this one has much less than meets the eye. I choose these particular cliches with care because Gladwell presents, over 250 pages of sometimes insouciant, sometimes infuriating prose, a thesis that many information professionals will find discouraging.

We live in a world where we are encouraged to consume information in bite sizes, often judging data out of context. Yet, here, Gladwell wants us to accept that we can make good judgements based on very little information - slices of it; what you can assess in a single blink.

He peppers his ...