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Summary: Pop-Psychology Not the Cure
Review: Unfortunately, "The Tipping Point" is a book I must say which I regret having bought. On advice from a friend and all of the good reviews it has had lately I went ahead and bought it. After reading it though, the book itself is, to me, another one of the many examples of mass-marketed popular psychology books, which, when printed, attracts a feeding-frenzy of so-called truth lovers and people who want to find out "how the world really is". (Note how many times this phrase is repeated on the online reviews of the book.) Even Gladwell himself purports to be speaking the "truth" but, unfortunately, examining a few cases which had something in common, or in which even the evidence was overwhelming does not account for"truth" and is in no way part of any psychological-scientific method. Even real psychologists will tell you that statistics cannot capture everything, which Gladwell does not.Either way however, what was most disturbing about this book turns on two things. First, Gladwell has coined many terms, e.g. "Mavens," "Connectors," etc, but fails, in significant places, to properly qualify them. Where he does qualify them, the arguments are much less strong than the social psychological weight they are meant to bear. Secondly, and more importantly, for those who are looking for "Cure-alls" to the so-called diseases of the world, and such, Gladwell has advice. But for those of us who are a bit more modest in our scope of possibilities (not to mention better read and more enlightened), the book's final, disgusting section on social engineering can only come as a surprise and a shock. Let's put it this way: In the 1600s, Thomas Hobbes' political and social-theoretical world was a much, much kinder and gentler place than Gladwell's in the 21st Century. I'll leave it at that.
Rating: 
Summary: I'm thrilled he wrote this book
Review: Gladwell's essay "Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg" came out in The New Yorker last year and totally changed the way I looked at my friends, my acquaintances, their roles in my life, and my role in theirs. I must have passed the article on to about 20 people (making me a "Maven" I suppose.) I'm absolutely thrilled that he's expanded on his ideas to book-length. A remarkable piece of thinking and writing.
Rating: 
Summary: a must-read for marketers
Review: When I was back in college, I would have loved this book for it's simple (yet optimistic) ideas for enhancing the social good. Now, a few years later, I like it because it gives new insights into a subject that is a tough-nut to crack - marketing in the internet age. A book that spans so many subjects (in so few pages) is definitely worth a try.
Rating:
Summary: As deeply human as it is thought-provoking
Review: Part Maven and part Salesman, Malcolm Gladwell compellingly expresses his Tipping Point theory as he has previous innovative perspectives in years of articles in The New Yorker: he presents his arguments with inimitable clarity and grace, addressing the reader personally in straightforward, unadorned language, and illustrating each point with vivid, specific examples. As moving as it is cerebral, as deeply human as it is thought-provoking, The Tipping Point is no mere marketing guide or scientific study. Reading it, I felt mesmerized, but that I was being convinced with my eyes open-ultimately, Gladwell is not a persuader but a teacher, and my mind tingled with learning on every page. When I finished the book and looked up, I felt subtly but unmistakably altered. With The Tipping Point, a small book with a varied, far-reaching scope, Gladwell brilliantly practices what he preaches: that little things can make a big difference.
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Summary: If Your Time or Business is Important--A Must Read!
Review: Gladwell has provided with specific cases and social issues just how connected everything really is. He provides the recipe as to how you can pin-point those important issues or epidemics utilizing the right people, right message, right time, and right context to accomplish your objective. Being a Theory of Constraints reader/student--Gladwell also argues that you must know the outcome you are seeking and then peel it back, until, from the balcony view, you can see where the limited resources should be applied. A must buy. Time is too short and business moves too quick to focus on the pebbles.
Rating:
Summary: I highly recommend it!
Review: This is an awesome book, widely ranging and consistently surprising. I can't tell you how many conversations I've had about it since I've read it--or how many people have buttonholed me to talk about something they'd read in it. "The Tipping Point" is essentially about social epidemics, and the way that simple model can explain all manner of things: how best to run a business, how to stop teenage smoking, how a movie becomes a hit, etc., etc. But this book itself turns out to be amazingly "contagious": once you've read it, you're bound to pass the word along.
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Summary: The Peddling of Influence
Review: Gladwell has an astonishing talent for making thethorniest of arguments relevant and crystal-clear. I was particularly engrossed by his analysis of the word-of-mouth phenomenon--the way Connectors and Mavens and Salesmen direct the flow of ideas in society. If you want to understand how the world really works, this is a good place to start.
Rating:
Summary: An intellectual kaleidoscope
Review: "The Tipping Point" was a really quick read, and yet I could scarcely sleep after I'd finished it: yes, it was that filled with excitement--forcing me to rethink a lot of my assumptions, from the meaning of moral character to the significance of sneaker brands! The book fairly thrums with intellectual life. Layered with sparkling, original insights, "The Tipping Point" will restore your faith in the power of ideas. I'd long read and admired Gladwell's articles in The New Yorker Magazine; he has a razor-sharp mind and he writes like a dream. But I was glad to find that "The Tipping Point" wasn't a collection of previously published work, that almost all of it was original to the book. Best of all, it's a book of ideas that reads like a suspense novel. How often can you say that? This is a one-of-a-kind book by a one-of-a-kind author.
Rating:
Summary: a tour de force of writing and thinking
Review: Like James Gleick's "Chaos" or Daniel Goleman's "Emotional Intelligence," Gladwell's book is irresistibly engaging, filled with ideas and observations that have immediate relevance to our lives. His style is almost deceptively lucid, because there's genuine scholarly rigor beneath his arguments. While he explores the latest research on social epidemics, for instance, he carefully eschews the widely discredited jargon of "memes" and "memetics." The result is a book that sheds new light on a host of subjects -- marketing, crime, education, smoking, you mame it -- without overstretching the limits of social science. "The Tipping Point" displays that highest form of intelligence: the ability to see resemblances among seemingly disparate things. Once you've read "The Tipping Point," you won't see the world in quite the same way again.
Rating:
Summary: Not the real thing
Review: The main problem with this book, for me at least, is that it just isn't substantial enough to be a BOOK. While the original article, which first appeared in the New Yorker quite a while back, was absorbing, delightful, and even thought-provoking, but I suppose my initial positive reaction was mostly due to the fact that it was a MAGAZINE ARTICLE, and I read it--as most people read magazine articles--while eating a meal alone or commuting to work; that is to say, without sitting at my desk, pencil and notepad at hand, paying each word and every sentence my undivided attention. I don't of course wish to disparage journalism or books written by journalists, but "The Tipping Point" suffers, I think, from everything that can go wrong when one adopts, expands, or simply reprints a newspaper or magazine article into a full-length book. The arguments Gladwell presents, when they're surrounded not by cute and funny New Yorkers cartoons but between the cardboards of a hardcover book, seem lightweight at best, and commonsensical, perhaps even farfetched, at worst. A fellow reviewer below has already noted the strange absence of any discussion of memes. Allow me to add that in a book that purports to reveal the little hidden mechanics that bring about tidal-wave changes in our social behavior and our society, the absence of detailed examination of memetics is simply unforgivable. (It'd be like writing a book that claims to talk about 20th-century physics but skips any mention of quantum mechanics.) In addition, some of the "scientific" methods employed by Gladwell seems dubious when they're not simply quixotic. For instance, the little experiment whereby Gladwell gave a list of people's last names to "400" people to read, asking them to give themselves a point every time they personally "know" someone who shares any of the last names on that list, seems just so pointless as not to merit inclusion even in a shoddily written article, much less a real book. And what's Gladwell's conclusion from this little experiment? That college students don't score too well, because they don't yet have the opportunity to know too many people, while real professionals, especially those whose business it is to have a lot of business connections, score the best. (You don't say!) And then Gladwell went on, apparently oblivious of the obviousness of it all, to dub the latter, the well connected, "the Connectors" (his capitalization; I should also mention that the author, like many fellow journalists, has the annoying habit of coining catchphrases, the usefulness of most of which seems rather questionable). If you think this is ridiculous, please allow me to assure you that the book is full of examples like this. All I can say is that if you're intrigued by the idea of the "tipping point," perhaps you should just go to your local library and photocopy those few pages of the New Yorker, rather than spend your money on the actual book. It's just not worth it.
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