The Tipping Point: Summary and book reviews of The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, plus links to an excerpt from The Tipping Point and a biography of Malcolm Gladwell.
The Tipping Point How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference
by Malcolm Gladwell
Hardcover: Feb 2000,
279 pages.
Paperback: Dec 2001,
304 pages.
Why did crime in New York drop so suddenly in the mid-90s? How does an unknown novelist end up a bestselling author? Why is teenage smoking out of control, when everyone knows smoking kills? What makes TV shows like Sesame Street so good at teaching kids how to read? Why did Paul Revere succeed with his famous warning?
In this brilliant and groundbreaking book, New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell looks at why major changes in our society so often happen suddenly and unexpectedly. Ideas, behavior, messages, and products, he argues, often spread like outbreaks of infectious disease. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a few fare-beaters and graffiti artists fuel a subway crime wave, or a satisfied customer fill the empty tables of a new restaurant. These are social epidemics, and the moment when they take off, when they reach their critical mass, is the Tipping Point.
In The Tipping Point, Gladwell introduces us to the particular personality types who are natural pollinators of new ideas and trends, the people who create the phenomenon of word of mouth. He analyzes fashion trends, smoking, children's television, direct mail and the early days of the American Revolution for clues about making ideas infectious, and visits a religious commune, a successful high-tech company, and one of the world's greatest salesmen to show how to start and sustain social epidemics.
The Tipping Point is an intellectual adventure story written with an infectious enthusiasm for the power and joy of new ideas. Most of all, it is a road map to change, with a profoundly hopeful message--that one imaginative person applying a well-placed lever can move the world.
San Francisco Chronicle Book Review The Tipping Point is propelled by its author's voracious but always amiable curiosity...Gladwell has a knack for rendering complex theories in clear, elegant prose, and he makes a charismatic tour guide. As a result, the book's constant movement from one cultural realm to the next...never produces any literary motion sickness.
The New York Times Book Review - Alan Wolfe
[A] lively, timely and engaging study of fads.... The Tipping Point is worth reading just for what it tells us about how we try to make sense out of the world.
Business Week
...an imaginative...treatise that's likely...to generate some buzz...it's hard not to be persuaded by Gladwell's thesis. Not only does he assemble a fascinating mix of facts in support of his theory...but he also manages to weave everything into a cohesive explanation of human behavior. What's more, we appreciate the optimism of a theory that supports, as another pundit once called it, the power of one...there's little doubt that the material will keep you awake...
Publisher's Weekly
...a particular boon for businesspeople looking for inspiration...
George Stephanopoulos
Hip and hopeful, The Tipping Point, is like the idea it describes concise, elegant but packed with social power. A book for anyone who cares about how society works and how we can make it better.
Commissioner William J. Bratton
.. a vital and 'must read' addition to the on-going debate about what really causes crime and disorder and how best to deal with it.
Michael Lewis Author of Liar's Poker and The New New Thing
What someone once said about the great Edmund Wilson is as true of Malcolm Gladwell he gives ideas the quality of action. Here he's written a wonderful page turner about a fascinating idea that should effect the way every thinking person thinks about the world around him.
Recent Reader Reviews
Rated of 5
by Dan C Good Book The book sets out to explain how certain events, both large and small, happen not necessarily by chance but by series of easily explainable smaller events that lead to a "Tipping Point." The tipping point can be defined as the moment in... Read More
Rated of 5
by Ricky Great book! The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell explains how different epidemics happen such as sicknesses, fashion trends, crime, rumors, and smoking. Gladwell also explains all the different things that go into making an epidemic happen such as word of... Read More
Rated of 5
by Joshua Lim The tipping Point An informative read, full of exciting examples.
Rated of 5
by Mark_Bledsoe
Excellent Read Takes you through the process where by trends reach the critical factor
Brilliant, illuminating, and immensely absorbing, Collapse is destined
to take its place as one of the essential books of our time, raising the urgent question: How can our world best avoid committing ecological suicide?
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