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Malcolm GladwellDavid and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2013A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “The Limits of Power”
Part 3, Chapter 7 Summary: “Rosemary Lawlor”
Rosemary Lawlor was a newlywed and a new mother in Ireland in the summer of 1969. Militant Catholics and Protestants were attacking each other across the country. Catholics were a minority in Northern Ireland and the Catholic Lawlors were afraid. They fled to the Catholic neighborhood of Ballymurphy, where things worsened by 1970. There were gunfights and riots. The British Army was summoned to maintain order. In June a woman named Harriet Carson arrived. She walked through the streets banging two pot lids and yelling for the hiding families to out. She said they all needed to go to the Lower Falls neighborhood, where families were locked in their houses and had no way to get food for their children: “The British Army had put the entire neighborhood under curfew while they searched for illegal weapons” (199). Lawlor’s father was worried that if they tried to help, the British Army would turn on them.
“The same year that Northern Ireland descended into chaos, two economists—Nathan Leites and Charles Wolf Jr.—wrote a report (“Rebellion and Authority”) about how to deal with insurgencies” (201). Their conclusion framed getting insurgents under control as a mathematical problem: “If there are riots in the streets of Belfast, it’s because the costs to rioters of burning houses and smashing windows aren’t high enough” (201).
Ian Freeland was the British general tasked with the Northern Ireland situation. He arrived with orders to put down resistance aggressively and publicly. On June 30, 1970, while searching a house in Lower Falls, people throwing stones attacked the British. A riot began. It had been stopped by 10 PM, but the already tense relationship between the Irish and the British was strained further. The next morning, Freeland toured the empty streets and thought that they would all be home within months: “Instead, what should have been a difficult few months turned into thirty years of mayhem and bloodshed” (203). They had believed that their superior resources and training would be enough to put down the insurgency, and that they did not need to consider how they were viewed in Northern Ireland.
Gladwell asks the reader to picture a classroom with walls covered in children’s drawings, and then to imagine a kindergarten teacher named Stella. She is sitting at the front of the room reading aloud—lists of ingredients—from a book while the children yell, make faces, and run around the room. An observer might believe that the children were unruly, but Gladwell states that the children are only reacting to Stella’s poor teaching method. She was so focused on the book, which was boring to begin with, that she can’t focus on the children: “We often think of authority as a response to disobedience: a child acts up, so a teacher cracks down. Stella’s classroom, however, suggests something quite different: disobedience can also be a response to authority” (205). Gladwell has been watching an actual video of Stella’s class, shown to him by researchers Pianta and Hamre.
In the next video, a teacher reads homework instructions to a class of children. One boy, after the instructions, begins to work on his assignment immediately. The teacher firmly tells him to stop because it is “homework” (207). He was eager to work and to learn, but if he becomes defiant, “it is because the teacher made him that way” (207). If someone is in the role of enforcing behavior, how that person behaves is critical.
Gladwell introduces the three principles of what he calls the “principle of legitimacy” (208). First, people who are asked to obey must have a voice and feel that they will be heard. Second, laws must be consistent and predictable. Third, the figure of authority must exercise its authority with fairness. As an example, he cites a multi-year, ongoing experiment in Brownsville, a New York City neighborhood: “For years, it has been among the most destitute corners of New York City” (208). The Brownsville projects always had a higher crime rate than other neighborhoods.
In 2003, a police officer, Joanne Jaffe, made a list of juveniles in Brownsville who had at least one arrest on their record from the previous year. There were 106, spread across 180 arrests, so her juveniles were likely responsible for even more crimes than they were caught at. Jaffe’s officers contacted the youths and told them they were in “the program” (209). The juveniles were told that every effort would be made to get them back in school, to provide services for their family, and to meet any foundational needs they had, provided that they stopped all criminal activity. “We are going to be all over you” (210), she told them.
In the Juvenile Robbery Intervention Program (J-RIP), Jaffe set up surveillance operations and cameras everywhere she could, to make sure the juveniles in the program knew they were being watched and that consequences would be dire if they committed crimes. She also prioritized staffing her task force with officers who loved kids and who had records of being able to sway them. Jaffe was also determined to meet and know the families of the J-RIP kids, but the families avoided her for the first eight months of the program. But then Jaffe and her officers bought Thanksgiving turkeys for every family and delivered them door to door, which finally resulted in real relationships.
Jaffe wanted to meet the families because she “didn’t think the police in Brownsville were perceived as legitimate” (214). Every juvenile in J-RIP was likely to have had at least one male relative who had already done time in prison. The police were seen as the enemy from an early age. Next, she began a Christmas toy give away for the J-RIP families, and then invited them all to a Christmas dinner. The robberies in Brownsville dropped precipitously over the next three years. Gladwell believes that if Ian Freeman had had the ability to see Northern Ireland as the Irish did, as Jaffe did with the J-RIP juveniles, a great deal of violence could have been avoided.
“July in Northern Ireland is the height of what is known as ‘marching season,’ when the country’s Protestant loyalists organize parades to commemorate their long-ago victories over the country’s Catholic minority” (217). It is always a time of violence and riots, which exasperated Freeland and caused him to enforce order even more harshly during marching season. During the Lower Falls riots, the Catholics were anxious to have the British protect them, but they were “equally anxious about how law and order would be enforced” (220). Freeland never stopped to ask himself if he had the legitimacy to enforce the law. In 1970, when Freeland threatened that anyone throwing gasoline bombs would be shot, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) pushed back, saying they would begin shooting the British soldiers. The violence increased over the coming years, and Rosemary Lawlor’s brother Eamon was among the casualties.
Part 3, Chapter 8 Summary: "Wilma Derksen”
In June of 1992, an 18-year-old named Kimber Reynolds was shot during a car theft by a man named Joe David. The shooting took place in front of a crowded, popular restaurant. Reynolds died the next day. Gladwell speaks with her father, Mike Reynolds: “Everything I’ve done ever since is about a promise I made to Kimber on her deathbed […] I can’t save your life. But I’m going to do everything in my power to try and prevent this from happening to anyone else” (234).
Fourteen hours after Reynolds’s death, her father went on the radio of show of Ray Appleton, a popular host. For two hours they took calls from people who knew the Reynolds family or who wanted to vent about the broken legal system in Fresno, where the murder occurred. Afterwards, Mike invited anyone he thought might be able to make a difference in Fresno’s high murder rate to a barbecue, including judges, police officers, lawyers, and many others: “Their conclusion was that in California the penalties associated with breaking the law were too low” (235). The group created a proposal that would be known as the Three Strikes Law. Someone convicted of a third criminal offense would serve 25 years to life in prison, with no exceptions. Three Strikes was passed in the spring of 1994. Over the next 10 years, the prison population doubled, but crime fell drastically.
Today, Mike Reynolds sees himself as a man who was fortunate enough to help save many peoples’ lives, even though he had to lose his daughter in the process. He became a highly influential figure in California: “In his case, power seemed to have achieved its purpose. Just look at the California crime statistics. He got what he wanted, didn’t he? Nothing could be further from the truth” (238). When considering law, order, and enforcement, Reynolds and the voters of California assumed that more—longer sentences, more arrests—must be better. However, Gladwell raises the question that no one asked: Was there any chance that Three Strikes could make crime worse?
Criminologists Richard Wright and Scott Decker interviewed dozens of armed robbers and asked them all how they thought about the threat of punishment. The robbers all had a similar answer: they didn’t think about it because it took away from their focus. They distracted themselves by planning the task or getting high, but they drove the thought of getting caught and penalized from their minds. A law like Three Strikes does not work on criminals who are in this mindset. When Joe Davis was asked about what he was thinking before the carjacking that ended in Kimber Reynold’s murder, he said, “I wasn’t really thinking much of nothing, you know. When it happens, it happens” (242). Davis’s family members and friends would later tell Mike that he had shot Kimber because he didn’t like the way she was looking at him. It is illogical to assume that the threat of punishment can intervene in a brain that operates like that.
Another argument for Three Strikes is that when a criminal is incarcerated, every year in prison is a year he can’t commit a crime, but Gladwell demonstrates the problems with the calculation: “The average age of a California criminal in 2011 at the moment he was convicted of his Third Strike offense, for example, was forty-three” (242). Before Three Strikes, the criminal could expect to be released on a common felony by the age of 48. After Three Strikes, he would be incarcerated until at least age 48. But criminals do not commit many crimes between the ages of 43 and 68, showing that Three Strikes has a better chance of working on young people.
There is an argument that cracking down on crime as aggressively as Three Strikes can actually make crime worse. The criminologist Todd Case believes that incarceration can have an indirect effect on crime: “A very high number of men who get sent to prison, for instance, are fathers” (245). The child of an incarcerated parent has a chance of becoming a juvenile delinquent that is “between 300 and 400 percent” (245). Case also argues that when a former prisoner returns home, he is likely to have replaced his non-criminal friends with criminal ones, and his future prospects for employment will probably not be robust. This can create stress on the family that may result in additional collateral damage. During studies on relevant populations in Tallahassee, Florida, Clear concluded: “If more than two percent of the neighborhood goes to prison, the effect on crime starts to reverse” (246).
The crime rates that appeared to drop in California after Three Strikes had actually been dropping prior to the passing of the law: “The more Three Strikes was studied, the more elusive its effects were seen to be” (247). Many sociologists and criminologists have studied the efficacy of Three Strikes, and there is still no consensus on whether it helped or hurt.
Ten years before Kimber Reynolds was murdered, a Winnipeg teenager named Candace Derksen was abducted, raped, tortured, and killed. When they left the police station after learning about her death, Candace’s parent Cliff and Wilma Derksen went home where friends and family visited them. A stranger came to their door and told them that he was also the parent of a murdered child. For hours, he told them about how his life had spiraled out of control in the aftermath, and how his search for justice had consumed him. He was warning them that they should know what to expect because he was sure the same thing would happen to them.
After 13-year-old Candace’s funeral, her parents spoke with the press. When asked how they felt about the person who had murdered their daughter, Cliff said, “We would like to know who the person or persons are so we could share, hopefully, a love that seems to be missing in these peoples’ live” (253). Wilma said that she had not forgiven the person yet, but implied that she hoped to be able to in time. Neither of them spoke of justice or retribution.
Gladwell asks whether Wilma is more or less of a hero than Mike Reynolds: “Each acted out of the best of intentions and chose a deeply courageous path” (253). The Derksens had different ideas about what could be accomplished through power. They were raised in the Mennonite religion as pacifists. The Mennonite philosophy was to forgive and move forward. But Gladwell writes that forgiveness is not only a philosophy, but a “practical strategy based on the belief that there are profound limits to what the formal mechanisms of retribution can accomplish” (255).
In 2007, the Derksens received a call from the police, who said they had learned the identity of Candace’s murderer. It had been 20 years. The man’s named was Mark Grant, and he had lived near the Derksens. He had been imprisoned for most of his adult life and would stand trial in 2011, which the Derksens attended. Wilma was conflicted as she watched Grant in court. She suddenly understood that he had taken pleasure in the suffering of her daughter and asked herself: “Why doesn’t someone just kill him?” (260). Eventually, she managed to forgive him, worried that the cost of doing otherwise would have ruined her. To her, fighting back “would have been easier in the beginning, but then it would have gotten harder. I think I would have lost Cliff, I think I would have lost my children. In some ways I would be doing to others what he did to Candace” (261).
Reynolds used the full power of the state and produced what is today deemed to be a fruitless and expensive social experiment. Wilma forgave Grant to protect her own family and sanity. Gladwell comments that in this anecdote, “[t]he world is turned upside down” (261).
Part 3, Chapter 9 Summary: “André Trocmé”
In 1940, France fell to Germany: “The German army allowed the French to set up a government in the city of Vichy” (263). A French general named Henri-Philippe Pétain, a World War I hero, was installed as a dictator. He immediately began collaborating with the Germans to take away the rights of Jews and placed many in internment camps. Most people in the region complied, but those in the small town of Le Chambon did not. Le Chambon had been home to many dissident Protestants, including a Huguenot pastor named André Trocmé. Trocmé was a pacifist but was firm in his belief that the people could not submit to unjust demands: “Loving, forgiving, and doing good to our adversaries is our duty, yet me must do this without giving up, without being cowardly” (264). He refused to allow fascist salutes in Le Chambon, and would not fly the German flag or salute it.
When Pétain decreed that all French teachers would sign loyalty oaths, Trocmé and his staff refused and did so again when Petain announced that pictures of him must be displayed in French schools. Jewish refugees began arriving in Le Chambon, which had gotten a reputation as being “hospitable” (265). In 1942, Pétain sent an official named Georges Lamirand of Vichy to Le Chambon to begin to set up French versions of Hitler Youth camps. Lamirand and his entourage received a hospitable but cold reception. After a banquet, a group of students approached Lamirand and gave him a letter saying that they had heard of the deportation of Jews, but could not support it. The letter concludes with: “We have Jews. You’re not getting them” (267).
Based on their other actions, Gladwell asks why the Nazis did not come to the defiant city of Le Chambon and make an example of them. He believes it is because of the argument already put forth in this book: “The powerful are not as powerful as they seem—nor the weak as weak” (268). The Huguenots had been persecuted for centuries and had never broken or given in to an oppressor. Trocmé’s wife Magda said, “The people in our village knew already what persecutions were” (269). They were able to sympathize with the plight of the Jews. Not helping them never occurred to the Trocmés. When asked how she made the decision to hide Jews, Magda replied, “There was no decision to make. The issue was, Do you think we are all brothers or not?” (270).
André Trocmé was arrested six months after Lamirand’s visit and taken to a prison camp. Two months later he was told that if he signed a loyalty oath and stopped his defiance, he could go home. Trocmé said no and did not even consider it. Confounded, the prison officials sent him home anyway. Later he would be forced from Le Chambon and would begin ferrying Jews across the Alps to the safety of Switzerland. He never stopped trying to help: “Trocmé was disagreeable in the same magnificent sense as Jay Freireich and Wyatt Walker” (272). He had nothing to lose and did not make decisions like typical people. When he was caught, he had been traveling under a false name. When asked if he was Monsieur Béguet, his pseudonym, he said, “I am Pastor André Trocmé” (273).
Gladwell asks how a Goliath defeats someone who thinks like Trocmé—someone who simply doesn’t care what is done to him. Near the end of the war, Trocmé’s adolescent son Jean-Pierre hanged himself. He would later write: “Even today I carry within myself, the death of my son, and I am like a decapitated pine. Pine trees do not regenerate their tops. They stay twisted, crippled” (274). Gladwell wonders if Trocmé did not remember Le Chambon for a moment, because he wrote one more line: “They grow in thickness, perhaps, and that is what I am doing” (275).
Part 3, Chapters 7-9 Analysis
Power that is wielded and misused by one person can still have devastating effects on those subordinate to it. But Part 3 raises the discussion to a level of worldwide import, casting entire armies and nations as abusers of power that can distort the trajectories of societies and countries for generations. It is not that Goliaths should be seen as powerless: they do not gain their formidable reputations without reason. The issue for Gladwell is more that the nature of power gets mischaracterized as limitless, and people who are not helpless began to see themselves as helpless.
Ian Freeland’s presence in Northern Ireland galvanized more bloodshed than was necessary. He could have acted as a potential defender and hero, winning the respect of the residents of Lower Falls, had he cared about how he was perceived by them, not only by his own men and government. According to Gladwell, the creation of the IRA and decades of fighting could possibly have been avoided if Freeland had been a tactful and considerate leader, instead of relying on brutish force and an assurance that no one could stand against British might indefinitely. By the time the Irish began opening fire on soldiers, it was too late.
Similarly, by the time Mike Reynolds and Wilma Derksen chose their paths in the wake of their respective daughter’s murders, it was also too late to avoid their personal tragedies. But Reynolds enlisted the help of the state in order to seek justice and, ideally, to prevent future crime. Derksen forgave her daughter’s killer, knowing that to hold a grudge and see a vague form of justice would come at too great a cost for her family and sanity. According to Gladwell, Reynolds’s enforced Three Strikes Law can be viewed as a counterproductive abuse of power. Despite well-intentions, the legislation did not bring about its stated aims. During the decade of its enactment, Gladwell suggests evidence that the law unintentionally garnered more crime, more fractured families, and a greater hatred of law enforcement for those who have incarcerated relatives.
The Nazi party in the story of André Trocmé is the clearest example of the misuse and illegitimacy of power. The Third Reich stated its aims clearly and intended to crush all resistance through brutal shows of force and cruelty. Their might was not enough to make Trocmé and the people of Le Chambon cower, however. Trocmé was unwilling to give in to a giant that would be responsible for over 6 million deaths by the end of the war. He refused to grant legitimacy to a power that was indisputably and demonstrably mighty. By ending with the story of Trocmé, Gladwell gives the readers a chance to ask themselves if their own lives are likely to intersect with a giant as fearsome as that of Hitler’s armies. The conclusion of the book encourages readers to ask if they are giving power more legitimacy than it deserves, and if they may be shortchanging their own progress and potential benefit to the world by assuming that their personal Goliaths are unbeatable.
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