After the last book, this book felt fairly easy to go through.
Malcolm Gladwell is such a good story teller. I listened to the audio book, and it was enjoyable to hear. He even adds some nice guitar backgrounds for dramatic effects in or smoother transitions.
The book talks about how the stories we consume in society either hinder or facilitate tipping points – for better or for worse. He mentions back when there was no Internet and everyone watched TV, most people agreed on basic values. At the time, knowing the amount of TV someone watched was a better predictor of voting patterns than how they voted last time.
Today there is no common story (TV shows) that provide the context for conversation – set the rules on what and how we can talk about things. Gladwell doesn’t say it explicitly, but that’s probably one of the reasons why we’re so fragmented in basic concepts. We no longer have one “overstory”, as he puts it, that sets how we can talk about things.
The book talks about the Holocaust, Medicare, the opioid crisis and the gay movement as examples of tipping points, and how his thinking connects to it.
I have to confess, I didn’t finish “The Tipping Point”, Gladwell’s original ticket to fame… so perhaps with that context this book might have different meanings.
Would I recommend this book? As a leisure read, yes. But I wouldn’t bump any other books on my “to read” list for this one. (Easy to say now that I listened to it)…
Fin.
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