Twenty-five years after the publication of his first book, Malcolm Gladwell returns with a brand-new volume that reframes the lessons of The Tipping Point in a new light.
At times...the narrative seems unduly slow and discursive, as he shifts, sometimes abruptly, from topic to topic. Still, Gladwell’s update of his ideas about tipping points will probably satisfy hard-core fans, and challenge and divert other readers ... It is not necessary to buy everything Gladwell is selling to appreciate Revenge of the Tipping Point. It turns out that trying to poke holes in his arguments is at least half the fun.
Malcolm Gladwell could have written a fresh book. Instead, he created a brand extension ... A genre bender: self-help without the practical advice, storytelling without the literariness, nonfiction without the vital truths, entertainment without the pleasure, a thriller without actual revelation and a business book without the actionable insights ... He has chosen to be a farm stand that serves salty, fatty, sugary pseudo-thinking. His signature methodology is to convey relatively boilerplate, already well-known ideas, by rebranding the ideas and wrapping them in stories.
Gladwell has changed nothing about his oddly solipsistic approach to crafting social theory ... After 24 years of proudly injecting new ideas into the public discourse, doesn’t Gladwell want to use his ample time, money, talent and stature to evangelize for unambiguously unimpeachable ideas? In other words, doesn’t he want to be interesting and correct? ... The book reads as a clear exercise in crafting social theory rather than mere 'reporting,' which makes the book only as good as Gladwell’s own ideas. And his ideas? They are all built atop an extremely facile metaphor about 'epidemics' that neutralizes nearly everything he wants to say ... Where Gladwell adds new concepts in this book, they mostly overcomplicate obvious principles or offer unnecessary neologisms ... With hundreds of years of scholarship at his disposal, it’s unclear why Gladwell writes within a quarantined-off universe where only his own theories have any validity.
