Twenty-four years ago, Malcolm Gladwell published The Tipping Point, his exploration of the hidden social currents that drive different forms of social change. The book was a sensation, a global bestseller that influenced politicians, policymakers and business leaders.
The Canadian has gone on to a successful career as an author, journalist and podcaster. Many others have drawn on his template, turning popular social science into a literary subgenre in its own right. Now he returns to the same themes that animated the original book. This time, he is more attuned to our dystopian times. Revenge of the Tipping Point mostly looks at why bad stuff — suicide, addiction, corruption, disease — happens and why it sometimes spreads.
Gladwell’s method hasn’t changed much over the years: he spots an underlying pattern (what he calls overstories) which others have missed, such as the connection between a 1930s San Francisco detective and the American opioid epidemic 70 years later.
Some of these theories seem flimsy. His suggestion that “group dynamics tend to stay stable when minority perspectives make up roughly one-third of the overall size” will come as a surprise to historians of Northern Ireland. But Gladwell is nuanced enough to always leave space for the contingent — or, indeed, the possibility that he may be wrong (he has renounced the highly influential “broken windows” theory on crime policy which he advanced in the original book).
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But some of the connections seem more like acts of faith than of deduction. A rumination on why it took decades for the full horror of the Holocaust to penetrate public consciousness starts promisingly with the experience of concentration camp survivors in postwar Los Angeles but then fixates on the impact of the 1978 TV series Holocaust. There is little doubt that the series was a catalyst but Gladwell fails to place it within the context of broader shifts in political and cultural attitudes. Here, as elsewhere, he seems more taken with his anecdotes about the programme’s production.
Occasionally thought-provoking, this is a book that ultimately fails to add up to more than the sum of its often entertaining parts.
