The best way to understand the dramatic transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life, writes Malcolm Gladwell, is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do. Although anyone familiar with the theory of memetics will recognize this concept, Gladwell s The Tipping Point has quite a few interesting twists on the subject. For example, Paul Revere was able to galvanize the forces of resistance so effectively in part because he was what Gladwell calls a Connector: he knew just about everybody, particularly the revolutionary leaders in each of the towns that he rode through. But Revere wasn t just the man with the biggest Rolodex in colonial Boston, he was also a Maven who gathered extensive information about the British. He knew what was going on and he knew exactly whom to tell. The phenome...

#Excellent Book (2008-03-03) In this book, Gladwell does a great job of explaining the tipping points of trends, fads, disease, etc, -basically any event imaginable. If we look close enough in our everyday lives we ll see the tipping point. After reading this book you should be able to see where it is exactly (almost) that mistakes are made, or good decisions are made. Great read -an eye opener for sure! (The idea is what attracts me as opposed to those that rate a book on the writing style, etc, especially for this style of information book. )

#I Just Tipped! (2008-01-17) When I published my own book a while back, my daughter gave me The Tipping Point to read. Even though I am a spiritual author, and generally only read books by other spiritual authors, I found this secular book to be very inspiring. In my work, I teach that there is a next right step that you are always being divinely guided to take -- a step that will help you fulfill your hearts desires in an effortless manner. That step is invariably a small step -- a tiny step, even. But those tiny steps, when taken one after another, prove to be miraculously effecti...

#The Hard Part Is Choosing What To Do First (2007-11-08) I was drawn into this book from the moment I cracked the spine. Each and every example had a very compelling start and story that left you wanting to talk to someone about what you had just learned. The topics are varied and range from Paul Revere s network to a syphilis outbreak in Baltimore to Blues Clues the children s t. v. program that made small changes to Sesame Street s premise and is revolutionized preschool education. Every time I took a break from reading I was thinking of how I could apply this the little things m...

#A fun and very interesting book (2007-05-30) I liked The Tipping Point very much. Gladwell does an excellent job explaining how Word of Mouth epidemics/Fads start, who contributes to creating it and who spreads the fad to make it known worldwide. I learned alot regarding teen smoking and how we have the power to counteract this horrible habit. In essence, Tipping Point is about social epidemics and how even the little things that people would seem to think are irrelevent may create big changes. Tipping Point is for the reader who is curious about how ppl think and how we as a whole...

#100 Monkeys Revisited (2007-03-31) Tipping Point is an excellent read. An engaging style sprinkled with humor and human interest make it flow easily. It reminds me of the concept of 100 Monkeys, whereby an idea gets to a critical point and suddenly becomes omnipresent. Anyone in business or marketing will enjoy the read and practical suggestions, direct and indirect, about promotion. Gladwell shows us all how easily our collective and individual psyches are manipulated. Budding psychologists and those interested in our inherent foibles will find the read entertaining and informat...

Amazon Best of the Month, July 2008: How could no one have written this book before? These days we spend almost as much time driving as we do eating (in fact, we do a lot of our eating while driving), but I can t remember the last time I saw a book on all the time we spend stuck in our cars. It s a topic of nearly universal interest, though: everybody has a strategy for beating the traffic. Tom Vanderbilt s Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) has plenty of advice for those shortcut schemers (Vanderbilt may well convince you to become, as he has, a dreaded Late Merger), but more than that it s the sort of wide-ranging contrarian compendium that makes a familiar subject new. I m not the first or last to call Traffic the Freakonomics of cars, but it s true that it fits right in with the school of smart and popular recent books by Leavitt, Gladwell, Surowiecki, Ariely, and others that use the latest in economic, sociological, psychological, and in this case civi...

#Reflections on Getting from Here to There (2008-09-24) If you ve ever been stuck in traffic alone (and who hasn t been?), all kinds of thoughts have occurred to you about how poorly the highways are designed, why drivers are so inconsiderate, what else you would like to be doing, and how to get out of this mess! Since cell phones have arrived, I regularly receive calls from my wife and children while they are stuck in traffic hoping that I ll have some suggestions for them. Tom Vanderbilt takes that vague reactions and tests them out. It turns out that driving isn t so natural for hu...

No hope, just an awareness of what s being done now and what s been done in the past, is what Ronald Wright will permit in A Short History of Progress, his grim, ammoniacal Massey Lectures, the 43rd in the series. In five lucid, meticulously documented essays, Wright traces the rise and plummet of four regional civilizations--those of Sumer, Rome, Easter Island, and the Maya--and judges that most, perhaps all, of humanity is making and will continue to make mistakes equally disastrous as theirs. He gives general reasons first for not reckoning we ll pull back from the brink. Important among them is an anthropological observation. As individuals, we live long lives. We evolve more slowly than we should, given our lack of vision and our aggressive, selfish nature. We seem to lack the collective wisdom and the insight into cause and effect to realize the limits to what Wright calls the experiment of civilization. What Wright calls natural subsidies underwrite civilizations successes. The...

#interesting (2008-06-03) this was an interesting book discussing the possibility of collapse. wright makes a point that there is a tendency for something to bring itself to an end, whether this is intentional or not. there is the extinction aspect, sometimes a species or group of people just can t cope with a change and they die out, like the sabre toothed tiger, as wright discusses. sabre toothed tigers survive on big game, thats why they need those big teeth to rip into the huge animals, but those teeth get in the way if they were hunting say a rabbit, so as big game died out so ...

#Want some discussion questions? (2008-04-11) The book is great, without a doubt. We did it for our book club, and I was unable to find any discussion questions anywhere, so I thought I d provide some here that I was unable to come up with. Another thing to mention in a discussion is the www. myfootprint. orgwebsite, where you can figure out how big an ecological footprint your lifestyle takes up. Most North Americans live a life that would take 8 planet earths to sustain. Discussion Questions1. Did Wright need to start as far back as he did in human history? Did his coverage of the N...

#Short History..period (2008-02-12) Up to the last chapter, except for some silly asides,the book was interesting. It is, of course, very one sided, and it seems that the author got his ideas about Ancient Rome from Holywood movies, like the Gladiator, or Augustus. If he studied archaelogical record from 1st century BC farming in Italy, he might have been surprised, that the family farm definitely was not dead, and that the brothers Gracchi wanted to help a very specific group of farmers, not the entire population, who did not need their efforts, and neither did they need their ext...

#A fantastic, well written, researched book. (2008-01-08) Anyone even mildly interestred or concerned about the current path of humanity should read this book. Mr. Wright draws upon the rise and fall of numerous past civilizations as a comparisson to the present day world.

#Good read and approachable (2007-12-10) I picked up this book because I have a growing interest in how a society or civilization can grow and sustain itself. This book gives several really interesting examples of societies who have come before us and are no longer in existence due to the fact that they were not able to sustain themselves. This book is easy to pick up and read, you don t require more than an average reading level to be able to interact and reflect on the material. I really recommend anyone to pick this one up for a great read.