Summer Reading List
The Tipping Point & Blink by Malcom Gladwell
I’ve heard a lot about both of these books so I decided to give them a try. I have to say that I think Galdwell’s true genius is in researching and retelling anecdotes. He manages to interweave a range of incidents that seem to have little in common on the surface and highlight their commonalities.
Between the two, I liked The Tipping Point better. I felt that his argument regarding what causes trends to tip into epidemics was well laid out and that each chapter built neatly on the last. Gladwell’s argument is that many of the most important factors in epidemics are some of the smallest and that often our intuition about how to prevent or cause epidemics can be wrong.
Blink concentrates on the unconscious cognition (i.e. “thinking without thinking”). He argues that a trained mind can make better decisions in a snap judgment manner then if they take the time to think them out. However, Gladwell admits that snap judgments can be wrong for a variety of reasons. There are many fascinating anecdotes in this book (especially the one about John Gottman, a psychologist who found that he can predict with 80% accuracy whether or not a marriage will end in divorce after watching a silent three minute video of the couple talking), but they never really come together into a cohesive conclusion.
