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Book Club: The Revenge of the Tipping Point

For Book Club in March we read Revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell. It was an interesting narrative, picking up on themes from his original book, the Tipping Point, but updating it to cover the Opioid Epidemic, Medicare fraud, teenage suicide, bank robberies and a slew of other maladies that have infected society.

While I deeply prefer to get my scientific research from peer-reviewed journals, Gladwell has a way of creating mass appeal on topics, and assuming it is done to invite learning, inquiry, and debate, I’m for it. Far too many narratives are seeking to tell folks who to blame for troubles in life, and I find those kinds of books appalling.  

What I struggled with in this particular book is how he stitched the narrative of the darker aspects of social epidemics into rules that didn’t always hold up in my opinion. He postulates that epidemics follow specific rules, shaped by dominant narratives, and are often driven by influential and powerful people. While I don’t disagree with the later two conclusions, I think he pokes at many “rules” which even his own stories don’t necessarily follow. e.g. he talks about a social epidemic of suicide in a community of driven teenagers, but the tipping point case of suicide happens 5 years before the subsequent “craze”—no students in the later wave were at school with that initial case, which made it hard to believe that could be the reason why the subsequent wave occurred.

Fundamentally, Gladwell tries to imply causality from data he cherry picks out of various stories, and sometimes he may have a grain of truth in there, but the research is not particularly thorough. I found in a pulp fiction sort of way that the novel was eminently readable. I found nuggets and factoids about our collegiate admissions processes and the Opioid Epidemic fascinating, and I’m not at all sorry I read the book, but I would have loved a more detailed and thorough analysis so that the conclusions and insights would have more weight.

Anyway, it was a quick read and won’t disappoint in giving you dinner table trivia to discuss for fun debates with friends, but there are definitely better researched books out there.



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