Blink - The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell Penguin, $130 A first impression from many of the US reviews of best-seller Blink is that supposedly real books should be large enough to double as door stops. The 277-page Blink is concerned with how we instinctively know what subsequent investigation later bears out. The gut reaction, if you like. The problem, of course, is that first impressions are governed by the subconscious, which sifts through all we know to give us a starting point. Malcolm Gladwell, who writes the Annals of Public Policy column for The New Yorker, got famous with his last book, The Tipping Point, a phrase that's now part of the modern lexicon. In Blink, Gladwell - who says 'decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately' - argues, with anecdote and evidence, a simple Zen philosophy: by training the subconscious, we can better fine-tune instinct. An example of poorly honed instincts lies with Amadou Diallo, who was shot 41 times by four police officers in the Bronx in New York. He was reaching for his wallet; their gut said gun.