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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. How does Gladwell characterize Wyatt Walker’s reaction to the police brutality in Birmingham?

2. Where did Gouré typically interview the Viet Cong?

3. When does Gladwell say the Troubles started in Northern Ireland?

4. When was Mike Reynolds’ daughter Kimber shot and killed?

5. What childhood trauma did Dr. Freireich’s wife Haroldine share with him?

Short Essay Questions

1. What does Gladwell say allowed Wilma Derksen to forgive her daughter’s murderer?

2. In what way does Gladwell say Hudson’s photo is “trickery” (192)?

3. What does Gladwell credit Bill Hudson’s photo of Walter Gadsden being attacked by the police dog in Birmingham with having done?

4. In what way does Gladwell say that northern Ireland is just like a kindergarten classroom?

5. What was Mike Reynolds’ reaction when his daughter Kimber was shot and killed by a meth addict?

6. What was the effect of the Three Strikes law in California?

7. How did Freireich compensate for the isolation that came from experimenting in the way he did?

8. How does Turtle win the race with Deer, in the Brer Rabbit story Gladwell relates?

9. How does Gladwell explain the trait that allowed Londoners to go about their business during the Blitz?

10. How does Gladwell say André Trocmé subverted the laws in Vichy France?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Gladwell seems to wear two different hats throughout David and Goliath: the storyteller and the analyst. What are the advantages and disadvantages of either role, and where is Gladwell strongest? Why?

Essay Topic 2

In many of Gladwell’s stories, Gladwell attributes a person’s success to the one trait he (Gladwell) is talking about—but this approach blinds us to the thousands of other variables that affect people’s careers and decisions, which in many cases are tied to other factors like the times, or simple luck, or the privileges of class and race that kept Dr. Freireich from being jailed for DWI, for instance (137).

How are Context and Privilege eclipsed in Gladwell’s stories, how does he try to account for them, and how successful is he? Does his refusal to include compounding variables ultimately compromise his examples to two-dimensionality?

Essay Topic 3

In many cases, you have to step back to a certain distance to share the values Gladwell espouses, overlooking, for instance, the sufferings of children with cancer, in order to see the value of Freireich’s cure, or to say that “You could kill André Trocmé” but “another André Trocmé would rise in his place” (274). How would you characterize the distance one has to have from things in order to see what Gladwell sees. Is it the distance of a scientist? An anthropologist? A statistician? A historian? What are the advantages and disadvantages of that intellectual/emotional distance?

(see the answer keys)

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