Take just the quickest glance at stores’ nonfiction bookshelves and you can’t help but make this snap judgment: Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink has reached the tipping point. Single-subject nonfiction is nothing new, but only Gladwell could make an industry standard out of white covers, single-word titles, sans-serif fonts, and vaguely self-help subtitles (See his own new best seller, Outliers.) Since publishers have apparently taken Blink’s insta-judgment credo, “judge a book by its cover,” to heart, we did some research. Behold, the future (and recent past) in blatant Blink knockoffs.
Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell.
Blunder: Why Smart People Make Bad Decisions, by Zachary Shore. November 2008.
Nudge: The Gentle Power of Choice Architecture, by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler. April 2008.
Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, by Margaret Atwood. October 2008.
Decoding Love: Why It Takes Twelve Frogs to Find a Prince, and Other Revelations From the Science of Attraction, by Andrew Trees. January 2009.
Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior, by Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman. June 2008.
