As a general rule of thumb here at dead insect, I try to avoid reading anything printed on actual paper that is longer than a crossword clue. So it may surprise you to find a book review, of an actual book with no pictures, no graphs, with proper sized writing and over 250 pages.
Here is a picture of this book, next to a mouse and a pen, so you can see how big the book and the writing is.
It’s called the tipping point, by Malcolm Gladwell. Everyone has read it except me and maybe you, if you still reading this post.
Anyhow it’s very good – all about the theory of how things like viruses or ideas spread. It covers the people that spread these ideas, the medium and content of these ideas, and finally the context in which these take hold.
Why it is good:
I believe that categorising things is a step towards understanding them. This book does that very well. Even when you don’t agree with the classification and loose definitions which he uses, they are good food for thought. For example he defines 3 key people types needed to spread ideas like wildfire: people with lots of friends, great charismatic salesmen, and gurus.
The book is short and almost every page is interesting. The whole thing took less than 4 hours even though I find touching books in public places makes me very uneasy.
He has lots of varied and thoughtful examples of epidemics, like incredibly sharp declines in crime, to uptake of boys painting their nails with magic marker like Kurt Cobain.
What is not so good
He never has a satisfactory example in which he illustrates clearly the difference between the context, content and the spreader people, and their relative importance; which makes you slightly think that maybe his framework is only useful in a post-rationalisation kind of way.
He has this whole thing where he talks about his framework solution to the smoking problem – stopping people getting addicted. He has some strong analysis off why people smoke, but then his whole solution to everything is to make the nicotine content in cigarettes so low that you can’t get physically addicted to them. If I had a big theory and could pick any hypothetical example to show how relevant my theory is, I would do better than that.
All in all it’s defo worth reading; high on thoughts with applications left to the reader. I estimate I will use about 5 of the concepts and ideas from the book in my job and life which makes them £1.40 each. So all in all very good, especially if I can expense this book for work.
