Today’s book review post is very specific. It explores the works of Malcolm Gladwell, a New Yorker writer turned best-selling author. Many will know Gladwell for some of these books, his most popular being The Tipping Point and Outliers.
This post describes and reviews six of Gladwell’s books. His latest and seventh book is: The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War. This book does not tie into the theme of pop psychology as much as the others and will be reviewed at another time.
Gladwell is also the host of the popular podcast Revisionist History and co-founder of the podcast company Pushkin Industries. A link to Revisionist History is provided in the resource section of this post. As always, check out some past posts: here and here.
Table of Contents
Post Contents
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
Explore the science behind viral trends in business, marketing, and human behavior. Malcolm Gladwell illustrates something similar to the butterfly effect throughout this book. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a small but precisely targeted push cause a fashion trend, the popularity of a new product, or a drop in the crime rate. The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.
Review: Interesting fact, the initial inspiration for his first book, The Tipping Point, came from the sudden drop of crime in New York City. The illustrates this drop in crime as a consequence to small changes that created an overwhelming change. As Gladwell’s first book, he is still getting into his stride of identifying and backing his assumptions with evidence. For instance, he cites the “broken windows” policy as the catalyst for the drop in crime rates in NYC; however, there is no evidence for this assumption.
Personally, I believe this book could be updated to fit in with today’s society. The changes in the internet, society, and overall advancement of technology contribute greatly to the tipping points described in Gladwell’s book. Overall, I greatly enjoyed the read and still find myself pondering his assertions. I think that Gladwell created a work that is stimulating, and engaging, and lends itself well to those who want to use its contents to serve those around them more effectively. It carries radical implications for what businesses can do differently.
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
Learn about choices that seem to be made in an instant-in the blink of an eye- that actually aren’t as simply as they seem.
Why are some people brilliant decision makers, while others are consistently inept? Why do some people follow their instincts and win, while others end up stumbling into error?
How do our brains really work-in the office, in the classroom, in the kitchen, and in the bedroom?
And why are the best decisions often those that are impossible to explain to others?
In Blink we meet the psychologist who has learned to predict whether a marriage will last, based on a few minutes of observing a couple; the tennis coach who knows when a player will double-fault before the racket even makes contact with the ball; the antiquities experts who recognize a fake at a glance. Here, too, are great failures of “blink”: the election of Warren Harding; “New Coke”; and the shooting of Amadou Diallo by police.
Review: This book dives into the inner world of every human, while the aforementioned inspected society as a whole. Gladwell explains how the human unconscious interprets events or cues, as well as how past experiences can lead people to make informed decisions very rapidly. Throughout the entirety of Blink you end up seeing how counterintuitive our first impressions may be.
In Blink he lays out how we quickly judge, and in the other he dives into how butcher context. For that reason you should absolutely read Blink first, followed closely by “Talking to Strangers.”
Outliers: The Story of Success
What makes high-achievers different? Gladwell explores the world of these “outliers,” whom he considers the best and the brightest, the most famous, and the most successful.
Do we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from? Throughout this book Gladwell explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, what made the Beatles the greatest rock band, and so much more.
Review: Gladwell examines how a person’s environment, in conjunction with personal drive and motivation, affects their possibility and opportunity for success. The main thesis of this book is that we should reject the myth of the “self-made man” because there are factors that lead to anyone’s success: being born in a certain year or being given a rare opportunity. I believe Gladwell could include more stories of failures, criminals, or others. If that’s the case how do we justify punishing people for their crimes when their circumstances were beyond their control.
In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell argues that, “Success is the result of what sociologists like to call ‘accumulative advantage’” (p. 30). In other words, what makes an individual an outlier, or someone so successful that they have been set apart from the majority of the population, is the culmination of hard work, opportunity, and a little bit of luck. Gladwell’s theories can be applied to modern education in startling ways. This book is one of my favorites of his because it helps many understand that circumstances beyond our control influence an individual’s life. More so, the nature vs. nurture debate.
What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures
What is the difference between choking and panicking?
Why are there dozens of varieties of mustard-but only one variety of ketchup?
What do football players teach us about how to hire teachers?
What does hair dye tell us about the history of the 20th century?
Here is the bittersweet tale of the inventor of the birth control pill, and the dazzling inventions of the pasta sauce pioneer Howard Moscowitz. Gladwell sits with Ron Popeil, the king of the American kitchen, as he sells rotisserie ovens, and divines the secrets of Cesar Millan, the “dog whisperer” who can calm savage animals with the touch of his hand. He explores intelligence tests and ethnic profiling and “hindsight bias” and why it was that everyone in Silicon Valley once tripped over themselves to hire the same college graduate.
Review: What the Dog Saw bundles together Gladwell’s favorite articles from The New Yorker since he joined the magazine as a staff writer in 1996. Gladwell kindly explains in the preface of the book of his purpose for offering readers a glimpse of what he has written in the past decade. With over 400 pages of enlightening essays in the Gladwell tradition, he takes an idea and he runs with it with a slew of intellectual curiosity that moves into various directions in the process that is not locked into one particular topic; most of what he writes about spans from education, politics, social, economic, cultural, and historical frameworks. What the Dog Saw never disappoints for readers that have grown accustomed to Gladwell’s writings.
David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants
Three thousand years ago on a battlefield in ancient Palestine, a shepherd boy felled a mighty warrior with nothing more than a stone and a sling, and ever since then the names of David and Goliath have stood for battles between underdogs and giants. David’s victory was improbable and miraculous. He shouldn’t have won.
Or should he have?
In David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwellchallenges how we think about obstacles and disadvantages, offering a new interpretation of what it means to be discriminated against, or cope with a disability, or lose a parent, or attend a mediocre school, or suffer from any number of other apparent setbacks.
Review: All advantages may seem to have disadvantages, but there’s more that meets the eye. This idea is postured in the story of David and Goliath in the Old Testament, where David is a small and feeble character who stands up against the mighty giant warmonger, Goliath. Gladwell uses this story as an invitation to a paradigm shift – that we might see disadvantages in a new light. Overall, this book is well worth reading as it can change your thinking for the better. Advantages have disadvantages, but disadvantages present the opportunity to discover new-found advantages.
Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know
Gladwell revisits the deceptions of Bernie Madoff, the trial of Amanda Knox, the suicide of Sylvia Plath, the Jerry Sandusky pedophilia scandal at Penn State University, and the death of Sandra Bland—throwing our understanding of these and other stories into doubt.
How did Fidel Castro fool the CIA for a generation?
Why did Neville Chamberlain think he could trust Adolf Hitler?
Why are campus sexual assaults on the rise?
Do television sitcoms teach us something about the way we relate to one another that isn’t true?
Something is very wrong, Gladwell argues, with the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don’t know.
Review: Most of us will concede that our news and social media sources have become highly politicized, so how do we reliably judge what we see when conflict arises? Gladwell has presented some significant answers in Talking With Strangers. Overall, the reader will need to sometimes draw their own conclusions as to how to apply these concepts to their own lives. Talking With Strangers addresses itself to complex societal problems. It is not a “how to” book. It is more about taking new knowledge into consideration before you judge, act, decide, react, set policy.
Resources
Malcolm Gladwell | Speaker | TED
Malcolm Gladwell on the Hard Decisions of War – The New York Times (nytimes.com)