Malcolm Gladwell Review
I will start this out by saying that Malcolm Gladwell is a pretty awesome writer. I would put him in the genre of “ADHD friendly.” His books have all scored a perfect zero on my own special “readability index,” which is based on the number of other books I end up finishing in the process. For example, Ernst Becker’s Denial of Death scored a 3 (due in part to Malcolm Gladwell) and Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov is approaching infinity.
I have read his three major works which are The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers. First a quick synopsis of each book:
The Tipping Point (2000): The “tipping point” itself is the instant when a certain thing or idea suddenly spreads like wildfire out to all corners of the globe. For example, I spent my whole life never knowing about People of Walmart .com and all of a sudden Monday comes along and two different people tell me about it on the same day. People of Walmart therefore “tipped” recently. Gladwell details how ideas spread from point A to your face through the actions of three types of people: mavens, connectors, and salesmen.
Maven = An early adopter.
Connector = A person who knows a lot of people in many different groups.
Salesman = Someone who is persuasive.
Blink (2005): Blink is all about snap decisions. Through the book, Gladwell gives examples of how snap decisions can be beneficial in certain situations and lead to negative outcomes in others.
Outliers (2008): This book is mostly about people who became wildly successful in certain realms and how they got there. There are some examples of the theory that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to be an expert at something and that certain people gained an unfair advantage (or disadvantage) through their upbringing. Some of the better case studies include the Beatles and Bill Gates.
The one thing that seemed odd after going through all three books is the inconsistency in how closely the stories tied back to the overall theme, and also the amount of work he put into achieving this. The Tipping Point was spot on all the way through, a very cohesive work. Then Blink came along. Once again, each story very obviously related to his overall theme, but this time around he spent the last 2-3 pages of each chapter explaining why they are related. In addition, he would rehash each of the previous chapters and re-relate them to the theme. It got a bit ridiculous and whenever he would start talking about the statues at the art museum I knew it was time to fast-forward to the next chapter. Third chronologically, was Outliers. The first half of the book was nicely done, like he got his Tipping Point groove back. The second half of the book seemed to get more off track as it went on. I can still gather why the last few articles were included, but if they we left out I feel like the book would have been as good if not better. It seemed like near the end he was stretching to thicken up the book a bit.
All three books are worth reading, though The Tipping Point was my favorite. Even the least interesting chapters in the least interesting book are still more entertaining than some other stuff that I’ve read and been content with. If you try hard enough, you can probably find some potentially deep holes in his arguments. But, I think that if he really focused on supporting every possible aspect, each chapter could be spun off into its own book, and those books would be really long and boring. Keep in mind the made-up genre that I put him in.
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2 Comments November 11, 2009
