I finished this book yesterday and, to be honest, do not see why it is considered a must-read by whoever put together "30 Books Everyone Should Read Before Their 30th Birthday". I realize that this list is pretty much an arbitrary collection, but I still would expect books included into it to have a little more value. I would not say that "The Tipping Point" was a bad book -- on the contrary, it was a page turner -- but I did not quite understand what Gladwell's message was.

In a few words, "The Tipping Point" is a non-fiction work that has to do with what the author calls social epidemics. In the very first chapter, Gladwell claims that, having read the book, one will know how to create a social epidemic of his or her own. He then proceeds with numerous sociological and psychological studies in order to prove that most of the big things that happen in the society are a result of seemingly minor actions by a few special individuals; he calls them Mavens, Sellesmen, and Connectors. The author also explores a few factors -- such as the stickiness factor and the power of context -- that, according to him, determine whether any kind of enterprise is going to succeed.

Trying to bring his point across, Gladwell uses pretty much every single sociological study that I was told about in Sociology 101 last year. While I found reading about these studies in his book to be much more interesting than learning about them from the textbook, I did not find premises that the author derived his conclusion from to be strong enough. It just seemed like Gladwell took every single study that is out there and twisted or interpreted it to somehow fit within his argument. I also did not find his ideas to be groundbreaking: most of them are just common sense and do not need to be supported by any scientific evidence.

In general, it is a good book to read if one wants to see how sociological studies can be useful. To be honest, even though I found Sociology to be interesting because of our amazing instructor, I did not quite see the point of all the experiments we were told about. Yes, it is nice to know that people act in certain way depending on situation they are in, but what is the point on knowing that if there is pretty much nothing we can do to change this behavior. Having read "The Tipping Point", however, I can see that these studies provide information that can be later used to take advantage of certain standard behaviors of individuals and, contrary to my previous idea about usefulness of these studies, control or modify social behaviors.

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