Finished reading 'Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, superspreaders & the rise of social engineering' by Malcolm Gladwell Sir.
To people who don't know, it's Malcolm Gladwell Sir who brought the word "viral" in the cultural zeitgeist. Before his first book - The Tipping Point - the word "viral" only meant people getting caught up with cold, high fever, incessant sneezing and a runny nose. Only after his book is when people started associating the world "viral" with products, people, art and ideas.
So you can imagine, what a mammoth contribution to the pop culture! He helped the world understand how things "blow up" with deep research on social dynamics and GREAT writing. And that was just his first book. Right after The Tipping Point, he wrote Blink, Outliers, David & Goliath, Talking to Strangers and The Bomber Mafia, all of which were philosophically revelatory works of genuine curiosity. Absolute masterpieces. And there was also What the Dog Saw, a collection of short stories, which deserves a seven minute standing ovation separately. That was the book which left me deeply informed and inspired, and also introduced me to Nassim Taleb. Can't be more thankful.
But this book.. Well, it was definitely not a masterpiece. In fact, it was not good at all. It lacked the philosophical centrepiece of an insight which only Malcolm Gladwell Sir always brought. Also, it didn't showcase any real curiosity for something actually deep and obscured. All the so called insights were simply not revelatory enough, and even the writing seemed very "plain". There was none (or very little) of the signature Gladwell wit and humour which used to make his books so incredible. This one was just a bore.
After getting disappointed page after page, I often thought maybe I've read too much since I was I first introduced to Malcolm Gladwell Sir, and so it's hard for me to get "excited" at this stage of life. Is it possible that I've "outgrown" him? But then I thought, if that was really the case, why did I love his last book (The Bomber Mafia) so much? That book really touched me and I still quote what I learnt from it so fondly.
So, no. It's not that I've "outgrown" Malcolm Gladwell Sir. I'm still a fan. It's just that this book basically just fell flat at every level. The research, the philosophy, the writing.. all of it was basically just "cold" in this one. And that's okay. There are always some hits and misses, and getting it wrong after seven masterpieces is no problem at all. I've always been the one to "preorder" his books, and probably will keep at it in the future as well. But here's a feedback to Gladwell Sir anyway:
Don't let your (political) ideology cloud your natural gifts, sir. If it comes in the way of your work as a sociologist and genius writer, it'll be sad. And then I'll have to sell your books in the second hand market instead of gifting them to my friends and family (or showcasing them in my library as if they're treasures).
Why do that?
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