When Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, appeared in 2000, it led to something like the viral impact about which Gladwell wrote in the book. The Tipping Point spent eight years on The New York Times Bestseller List and to date has sold more than five million copies. Few educated Americans today fail to recognize the phrase, which has become firmly embedded in the English language. So it can be no big surprise that Gladwell would seize the opportunity to write a sequel to The Tipping Point nearly a quarter-century later. And, like the original book, Revenge of the Tipping Point is a curious mixture of insightful commentary on American society with an occasional diversion into questionable logic. In other words,, the new book demonstrates the same flaws that led many critics to savage the old one.
An awkward and questionable example
Take, for example, the case study with which Gladwell leads the new book. It’s one to which he devotes an especially large measure of attention. In one of several broadsides aimed against Harvard University, he questions why the university would field a competitive women’s rugby team. Of course, he has an answer. Doing so allows the university to admit a number of women whose academic record would not otherwise qualify them for admission.
Wonder why? Take a look at a photo of the team assembled on the field. The signs of diversity are few and far between. In other words, fielding the team allows Harvard to include legacies and the daughters of potential or actual major donors when under pressure to admit larger numbers of people of color. And that might well be true enough. But Gladwell utterly rejects the possibility that Harvard might have other reasons for doing so as well. for instance, catering to alumni pride that Harvard, so well known for academic excellence, would support a larger number of Division I sports teams than any other major university.
Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering by Malcolm Gladwell (2024) 346 pages ★★★★☆
A book dominated by much more convincing case studies
Still, most of the book features case studies about issues of undoubted importance. The origins of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. High school suicide clusters. The sudden and rapid spread of knowledge about the Holocaust. The growing acceptance of gay marriage. And the opioid epidemic. In each case, Gladwell convincingly explains what happened and why, making clear that none of these things were foreordained. Yet his arguments about these phenomena challenge conventional wisdom. They’re worth the price of the book and the time spent to read it.
With all that said, Gladwell has a habit I find annoying at times. He invents new phrases and “laws” to help label the behavior described in his examples. “Overstories.” “Superspreaders.” “The Law of the Few.” Little of this is entirely new, as the original book featured the same sort of thing. But I admit that my patience for this sort of pseudoscience has diminished in the past quarter-century. I wish he’d just contented himself with telling stories. He’s really, really good at that.
About the author
Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. He gained much wider fame four years later with the publication of his first book, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Revenge of the Tipping Point, a belated sequel, is the seventh subsequent book he has written. But he continues to pursue his career as a public speaker and podcaster as well as an author.
Gladwell was born in England in 1963 of an English father and a Jamaican mother. When he was six years old, he moved with his family to Canada, where he became a citizen. He holds a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Toronto. He had his first child, a daughter, in 2022.
For related reading
I’ve reviewed three of the author’s previous books:
- The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War (Malcolm Gladwell wades into the debate about strategic bombing in WWII)
- David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (Disability can be a great advantage)
- Talking to Strangers (Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book explains recent history)
You’ll find other great books at Gaining a global perspective on the world around us and Science explained in 10 excellent popular books.
And you can always find my most popular reviews, and the most recent ones, on the Home Page.
