To two critics at least, it’s time to point out the downside to two major icons of our time—Tuscany as the epitome of simplicity, security and the good life, and Malcolm Gladwell as the reigning king of pop psychology.
For quite a long time now, the provençal town of Tuscany in Italy has been a charming symbol of la dolce vita to many Britons and Americans. But in his review of Ferenc Máté‘s new book,
The Wisdom of Tuscany, for the October 30, 2009 issue of
WorldHum, travel writer Frank Bures says that there’s a ring of untruth to Mate’s vision that “all that is perfect in Tuscany is all that is wrong with our own society.” Finding fault with Mate’s having turned the fascination of Tuscany into a service piece that merges travel with self-help, Bures contends that “this kind of simple-minded Italophilia is painful stuff at this point, and demonstrates how the genre has exhausted itself, and from now on can be little more than a self-mocking cliche.”
Read Frank Bures’s “The Death of the Idyll” in WorldHum now!Malcolm Gladwell has charmed thousands of readers worldwide with books dealing with counterintuitive findings from little-known experts, making his
The Tipping Point,
Blink, and
Outliers mega-bestsellers and himself a popular lecture speaker on both sides of the Atlantic. But in a review of Gladwell’s latest book,
What the Dog Saw, in the November 7, 2009 issue of
The New York Times, Harvard University psychology professor Steven Pinker warns that the latter’s latest collection of essays explaining improbable things “unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of statistical reasoning.” Pinker explains: “An eclectic essayist is necessarily a dilettante, which is not in itself a bad thing. But Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring.”
Read “Malcolm Gladwell, Eclectic Detective” in The New York Times now!
