“And there went out a champion out of the camp of the Philistines, named Goliath, of Gath, whose height was six cubits and a span.” — 1 Samuel 17:4

From: Canadian Business

"A new Malcolm Gladwell book [David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants] isn’t a publication, it’s an event. Since The Tipping Point was published 13 years ago, the New Yorker staff writer has made himself comfortable at the top of bestseller lists, built a lucrative second career on the corporate speaking circuit, inspired a mini-boom of counterintuitive quasi-academic books, and helped define this TED-talk era of public intellectualism. More than an author, Gladwell is an industry.

     […] we should have considered David the favourite the moment he entered the Valley of Elah with his sling. In those days, projectile warriors like David, armed with mere stones, regularly defeated heavy infantry, clumsier fighters weighed down by armor. Goliath was expecting hand-to-hand combat with a fellow warrior. David changed the rules on him.
     This is the problem with giants, Gladwell argues: 'The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness.' Moreover, being an underdog can lead a person to change the way he or she operates. Underdogs take risks and chart strange new paths that the conventionally powerful rarely attempt."
— Nicholas Hune-Brown, Canadian Business
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"What if we lived in a world where the weak were really strong, and all of our disadvantages could easily become advantages? In his new book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, bestselling writer Malcolm Gladwell tells us we're already living in that kind of world. Even something as debilitating as dyslexia can be an ambitious man's ticket to success.
     'The one trait in a lot of dyslexic people I know is that by the time we got out of college, our ability to deal with failure was very highly developed,' says Gary Cohn, a man of humble origins whose bold decisions take him to the top of the U.S. financial industry. 'I wouldn't be where I am today without my dyslexia.'
     Gladwell, a staff writer at the New Yorker, has sold a ton of books explaining seemingly counterintuitive and complex arguments about psychology and the social sciences to a mass audience. In David and Goliath his mission is to show us how our thinking about power, influence and success is often misguided and wrong."
— Hector Tobar, Los Angeles Times
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How tall was Goliath? Go here...

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(which is only 25 km or 15 miles away from his home town of Elmira, Ontario).

"...massive money sink of a mausoleum."

"In a Q+A session with Bloomberg Businessweek writer Brad Stone, the Canadian author of The Tipping Point and Blink [Malcolm Gladwell of Elmira, Ontario] described the flagship NYPL building in Manhattan as a 'massive money sink of a mausoleum.'

     'Every time I turn around, there's some new extravagant renovation going on in the main building. Why? In my mind, the New York Public Library should be focused on keeping small libraries open, on its branches all over the city.'
     The NYPL announced a major $300 million renovation of its flagship location last year, to be completed in 2018.
     Gladwell continued, 'Luxury condos would look wonderful there. Go back into the business of reaching people who do not have access to books. And that is not on the corner of 42nd and Fifth [Avenue].'
     ...A little earlier in the discussion, Gladwell spoke about libraries as 'the only place where you can browse [books]. A world in which you can only find things that you have chosen to pursue is an incredibly impoverished one.
     'Libraries are also safe havens for people who are not from privileged backgrounds, who do not have access to books and where there is no quiet space to work.'"
— Huffington Post
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Buy all of Malcolm Gladwell's books here...