Gladwell, Malcolm

• The Tipping Point

  • This book is what amounts to a sociologist's educated guess about events that shape society. Gladwell presents several examples of how fads and other social movements got their beginnings from relatively minor events that can be pinpointed. He calls these events "tipping points" since they marked a watershed in the history of everything from shoe sales to epidemics to crime rates.

    Gladwell goes on to explore common traits of ideas that are successful, discussing in detail how advertisers try to reach the public, how children's shows try to reach kids, how it might be possible to eliminate smoking and many other interesting problems. This is a very readable book, though I'm not sure how sound the science is behind it. Even if Gladwell is wrong about his theory, there is a lot of basic information here about how these sorts of things work, and it is fascinating.

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