| SamuelRSmith said: Hmm, never heard of the series, what are the books like? Is is just some sort of hard hitting fact-fact-fact, like Niall Ferguson's style writing, or a more jokey, colloquial style like the Freakonomics books? I can only read the former if I agree with the opinion of the author... my nan got me some book on the collapse of globalism - that was a straight-lined book, and I kept throwing it around the room in anger where I didn't agree with the author :|. |
They're not as much economics based but still very interesting and take things in factual ways with scientific studies. Though there is a LOT of humor there.
for some Wikipedia quotes.
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking is a 2005 book by Malcolm Gladwell. It popularizes research from psychology and behavioral economics on the adaptive unconscious; mental processes that work rapidly and automatically from relatively little information. It considers both the strengths of the adaptive unconscious, for example in expert judgment, and its pitfalls such as stereotypes.
Outliers is a non-fiction book written by Malcolm Gladwell and published by Little, Brown and Company on November 18, 2008. In Outliers, Gladwell examines the factors that contribute to high levels of success. To support his thesis, he examines the causes of why the majority of Canadian ice hockey players are born in the first few months of the calendar year, how Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates achieved his extreme wealth, and how two people with exceptional intelligence, Christopher Langan and J. Robert Oppenheimer, end up with such vastly different fortunes. Throughout the publication, Gladwell repeatedly mentions the "10,000-Hour Rule", claiming that the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours.
Tipping points are "the levels at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable."[1] Gladwell defines a tipping point as a sociological term: "the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point."[2] The book seeks to explain and describe the "mysterious" sociological changes that mark everyday life. As Gladwell states, "Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do."[3] The examples of such changes in his book include the rise in popularity and sales of Hush Puppies shoes in the mid-1990s and the precipitous drop in the New York City crime rate after 1990.
