I picked up the latest Malcolm Gladwell book a few months ago at the Barnes and Noble. I had really loved The Tipping Point from 2000, and I’d seen a couple of videos of talks that Gladwell has done, so I was really looking forward to this book. I know that he has to take a lot of guff from popular reviewers who try to claim that he has too simplistic a theory of success, but that’s bullshit. They clearly are not reading the same book, or aren’t paying very close attention.
Gladwell is good at building the case to support his ideas. Actually it seems as if his ideas are the result of studying the topic rather than coming to the topic with preconceived notions. He issues plenty of caveats at all the appropriate places, and he definitely recounts a lot of great anecdotes.
He is where I first learned about the 10,000 hour rule and that led to a fruitful strain of further research that I really enjoyed. Gladwell is definitely one of my favorite writers.