Caroline's Reviews > The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

** spoiler alert ** Malcolm Gladwell has written five books, all of which have been on the New York Times bestseller list. He is extremely readable.

This now-famous book is about popular ideas and products, and how they spread through society. Starting off small at first, they slowly gather momentum until they reach a 'tipping point', where they take off and become fantastically popular. This book is all about the mechanics of how this happens, and the different types of people and businesses enabling the process.

The best bits for me? The illustration of how we are all incredibly different - how some people are freakishly sociable, others are freakishly knowing, informative and knowledgeable, whilst others have the charisma to sell you anything. Given Gladwell's clear examples I was easily able to slot a couple of my friends into these categories, and therefore relate to the ideas he was describing. These are the movers and shakers - the people who make things happen.

He uses a wide range of phenomena to illustrate the idea of social epidemics - the rise to popularity of Hush Puppy shoes, a sudden decline of crime in New York, the success of the children's programmes Sesame Street and Blue Clues, the cleaning up of the New York subway, the spread of new corn seed in Iowa in the 1930s, an increase of suicides in the South Pacific islands of Micronesia, plus the reasons why smoking has drastically increased amongst teenagers in the US, despite strenuous efforts to discourage it. I was impressed by the wide range of his examples.

My one criticism is that it was all rather predictable. The relationship between causes and effects were often ones I had heard before, or that I had worked out for myself. Unlike the book Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything I didn't feel that I was being exposed to some really original ideas behind society's statistics.

Still - an interesting read by an excellent writer. It clarified several concepts I already had, and made them a lot less woolly.