Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering. by Malcolm Gladwell.

Genre: Nonfiction, Pop Sociology. 352 Pages.

I enthusiastically recommend Revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. Not to be overly dramatic, but for me, reading this book, was like rediscovering an old love who I had thought that I could never love again. In that sense, I surprised by the depth of the feelings that were awakened in me as I read the stories in this book. It was like falling in love in Malcolm Gladwell again!

Also if you listen to the audiobook version, as I did for about the first half of the book, you might enjoy listening to Malcolm Gladwell narrate the book and the audio clips from the primary sources of information (like the Purdue Pharma Congressional Hearings) that are referenced in the book.

Short Story Long: I read Gladwell’s original The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference when I was just a fresh faced twenty-eight year old. Another young person, whose finger was on the pulse, told me about it. It is a very optimistic book. The subtitle says it all: how little things make a big difference. It knocked my socks off.

I then told other twenty-something friends, and surprisingly, they read too. In the Author’s Note of the The Revenge of the Tipping Point, Gladwell wrote that while the original debuted to crickets, where hosted a book reading with just two attendees, “A stranger and the mother of a friend of mine– but not my friend. . . It, grew like the epidemics it described–at first gradually, then all in rush.” And though my friends and I were not part of the first wave of readers, we were part of the swell that made Gladwell a household name.

From that point on, I had become a Malcolm Gladwell devotee. I followed his writing. Reading Blink, Outliers, and David and Goliath not long after they were released. I enjoyed them all. After reading Outliers, I loved hearing references to the 10,000 hour rule on the kinds of silly comedy shows I watch. 10,000 hours, Gladwell wrote, is the number of hours that the Beatles played together as a band in casinos in Germany, before they became famous. Essentially, Gladwell hypothesizes, that to really master a subject, you need to devote 10,000 hours to it.

In his book David and Goliath I loved reading about how disadvantages, like a parent dying or dyslexia, can become advantages to children later in life. As I read his books, I drank his words and digested them whole. Reading his works, for me, represented a time in my life when I devoured radio programs like This American Life and sought out Michael Moore documentaries. It was a younger more idealistic time in my life and maybe in history.

Then, I started to lose my taste for Malcolm Gladwell projects. The beginnings of my disinterest maybe began when I starting talking about my Gladwell fandom and I met people who told me that they did not think highly of Gladwell’s writing¹.

Part of the problem, is that at the time, I may have wrongfully assumed that the people who told me these things were people who knew more than me. They may have read articles like this one from Slate². They might never have read one of his books ³. They may have overheard that opinion at a pretentious cocktail parties and decided to repeat them. Here is an Atlantic article that explores why people love to hate on Malcolm Gladwell that appeared in the Atlantic in 2009.

Back to me though . .

I might have also lost further interest when Malcolm Gladwell started his podcast Revisionist History in June of 2016. When his podcast started, I was a first time stay-at-home mother to a seven-month old. I had newly lost any real or false sense of having my finger on the pulse of the world. So didn’t seek his podcast out.

Perhaps, it was the announcement of the unexpected outcome of the Brexit vote in England in June of 2016. Perhaps it was because the election season of 2016 was an especially heated one. Perhaps my mind was on my little one. By this time Revisionist History premiered, my brain was already somewhere else.

Not to over dramatize it, but my Malcolm Gladwell reading self was dead by 2016. I fell out of love with the types of things that Malcolm Gladwell represented for me: idealism, social consciousness, youth, and having a finger on the pulse. I was now a mother and was moving farther away from the sought-after youth demographic with each breath.

But luckily, all was not lost. That Katie still lived inside of me somewhere after all. She was found and reconstituted when I opened The Revenge of the Tipping Point on September 7th of this year. She was as curious about the little forces that make a big differences as ever. She also was curious about the Overstory, which is what Gladwell examines in this most recent addition.

The Revenge of the Tipping Point focuses stories about: how Miami became more corrupt than other Florida cities, bank robbing epidemics, the near extinction of cheetahs, a high achieving suburban high school with a disproportionate suicide rate, covid superspreaders, and Holocaust survivors being able to tell their story finally after many years.

Gladwell uses principles demonstrated in those stories to finally tell the story of what events exactly transpired to exacerbate the opioid epidemic in the United States. Revenge of the Tipping Point is a quick moving book with so much information that you might have difficulty retelling it to your loved ones when you done reading it. Critics might feel that Gladwell uses trickly storytelling that does not focus on one subject for a long-enough amount of time. However, I personally enjoyed the pace and like the number of subjects covered in the book. It has made me curious to learn more about of topics outside of this book.

For example, one factoid that I learned is that all cheetahs are highly related due to bottleneck genetics around 10,000 years ago. They are so related that there is very little genetic diversity between them and because of this they have trouble reproducing and are susceptible to diseases. Zoos struggled to figure out why cheetahs were having trouble in breeding and surviving in captivity. They eventually they figured out this puzzle and have tried to take measures to increase genetic diversity. This is just one of the interesting stories examined in this book.

So if you are an “Um, Actually” kind of person, like me, you might really enjoy this book. Even if you aren’t that kind of person, you might enjoy this book. It is a non-fiction book with a storyteller’s arc. It’s interesting, informative, and hardy dry. The audiobook is an engaging listen. I borrowed it digitally from a library app called CloudLibrary that I accessed with one of my library cards.

So give it a try on your next audiobook walk. You won’t be disappointed.

Revenge of the Tipping Point: Hardcover Release Date: October 2024. Published by: Little, Brown and Company. Reached Number 3 on the New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction List. Will be released in paperback on September 30, 2025.

1. [You would think that hearing a differing opinion on a book would not be dissuade me so easily, but you should know that I stopped eating ketchup on my eggs for several years after a friend told me that she though it was gross. I can be quite susceptible to suggestion]
2. [Slate.com is a tantalizing website for a certain type of “Um, actually” person. It’s readership skews older now, but back in 2013 it was popular with the much coveted 25-54 age range.]
3. [I have a thing against people who have bad attitudes about books and authors they have never read].