Revenge of the tipping point Overstories, superspreaders, and the rise of social engineering

Review by Booklist Review

When does a thing become a thing? When do seemingly random events coalesce into an identifiable trend, belief, or behavior? Are such phenomena organic, or can they be manipulated to produce a certain outcome? Gladwell revisits the terrain of his first book, The Tipping Point (2000), to consider such topics as analyzing the numerical points where group dynamics can shift, investigating the factors contributing to the near extinction of a species, and dissecting institutionalized experiments in social engineering. Gladwell explores the notion that individuals, wittingly or not, bear direct responsibility for collective activities. Patterns cannot be perceived from close range; a larger perspective is necessary to recognize changes in attitudes or actions. Gladwell terms this the overstory and uses the conflict over gay marriage to illustrate how something once deemed a political and cultural anathema became the law of the land. Positioning his theory of the superspreader within COVID-19 and the opioid epidemic, Gladwell deftly demonstrates how attention to statistics and data points can shape a business, school, or community. An astute and bracing appraisal of how cultures succeed or fail.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Best-selling Gladwell's updating of the concepts in the book that made him famous will garner lively media coverage and reader interest.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Journalist Gladwell befuddles with this convoluted revisiting of his bestseller The Tipping Point. Aiming to reveal abuses of the tipping point phenomenon by the powerful, Gladwell's primary example is Purdue Pharma's peddling of opioids. To build his case he grafts two new metaphors onto the tipping point concept. One is "overstories"--overarching social ideas which, like the top layer of canopy in a forest, affect the behavior of everything below. The other is a suite of epidemiology metaphors drawn from the Covid pandemic, most notably the concept of superspreaders, which, to be fair, is a great example of "The Law of the Few," an idea Gladwell wrote about in The Tipping Point that states that a big demographic problem is often actually caused by only a few people. In the end, while he connects Purdue's misdeeds to both "overstories" (Purdue targeted states without strong preexisting narcotics regulations) and superspreaders (Purdue focused its efforts on prescription-happy doctors), Gladwell never really lands the tipping point angle. He writes that Purdue's switch to a less easily snortable version of the drug "tipped" OxyContin users into heroin users, which seems, like so much else in the book, to bring the definition of a tipping point right up to its own tipping point into oblivion. As he climbs the rungs of his argument, Gladwell entertains with his deep cache of anecdotes. But it's a ladder to nowhere. (Oct.)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A quarter-century on, Gladwell revisits his best-known book and examines some of its assumptions and conclusions. RereadingThe Tipping Point, Gladwell writes, made him realize "that I still do not understand many things about social epidemics." Thetip point of real estate parlance--it refers to things such as the ethnic composition of a neighborhood when, once a percentage in the growth of racex is reached, members of racey will move up, on, or otherwise out--explains only so much. Often, he writes, "social contagions," a metaphor used to describe how ideas spread like viruses, can be traced back to just a handful of innovators (or viral superspreaders, for that matter): What matters thereafter is how the ideas (or viral loads) are received and dealt with. For example, why does Illinois have a low rate of opioid abuse relative to Indiana? Because Indiana, like many states, doesn't require monitoring, which explains why swarms of Big Pharma salespeople descended on those states to push OxyContin and other drugs to epidemic levels. Illinois, by contrast, is one of the states that require triplicate prescriptions: one copy goes to the pharmacist, one to the patient's records, one to a regulatory agency. That three-tiered pharmaceutical pad, Gladwell writes, "evolves into an overstory," or governing idea, "a narrative that says opioids are different, spurring the physician to pause and think before prescribing them." Refining and deepening his and our understanding of the spread of customs, mores, and practices, Gladwell emphasizes those overstories, illustrating them with twisting and turning tales of, for example, how the wordholocaust came into general usage (surprisingly, via TV), how the idea of gay marriage gained acceptability, and how widespread social engineering "has quietly become one of the central activities of the American establishment." Fans of the original will learn much from Gladwell's thoughtful, carefully written reconsideration. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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