Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point

Ever since my undergraduate studies, I’ve been extremely interested in the application of economics. Taking the suggestion of my Globalization professor in my MBA program, I decided to pick up Malcolm Gladwell’s 2000 book, The Tipping Point.

Don’t be scurred of the book simply because I started off with my declaration of love for economics – you don’t have to be an economist or even think like one to understand Gladwell. He writes more about everyday events from a sociologist perspective as opposed to an economist perspective. So fear not.

As taken from Wikipedia, The Tipping Point can be loosely defined as "the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point." And Gladwell takes events such as the syphilis outbreak in Baltimore in the mid-1990s or the drop in New York City’s crime-rate or the resurgence of Hush Puppies popularity and describes how each event reached a point where an epidemic broke loose. Each event has some sort of, dare I say, tipping point that keeps all metaphorical hell from breaking loose. Once you reach that point, syphilis outbreaks or crime drops or hipsters aren’t the only ones wearing Hush Puppies anymore.

When change as such happens – it happens fast. To apply an economic principle, as Gladwell does, 80% of the work is accomplished by 20% of the people. Examples he provides are 80% of beer is consumed by 20% of beer drinkers, 80% of car accidents are because of 20% of drivers, so on and so forth. A small few wear Hush Puppies, a small few practice unsafe sex in combination with other things to pass on syphilis, a small few decide to straighten up and fly right in New York – and an epidemic breaks loose once it reaches a certain boiling point.

Want to know more about the Stickiness Factor as practiced by Sesame Street or Blue’s Clues? The Power of Context in Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood? Check out the book if for no other reason than to sound smart to your friends.

April Updates

I'm going to head across the pond next week and I intend to finish a book before I come back.  I had Angela's Ashes recommended to me and, since I am going to Ireland for 10 days, I thought I would read that on the plane.  So check back and see how that goes.

Also, my sister and I had a pretty in depth discussion of the movie, Gone With The Wind, the other day and we decided to read through the book together.  Hopefully this will start in May, one of us will read a chapter and then post, then the other will read the next chapter and post.  We'll comment on each other's entries, hopefully, and encourage anyone who wants to to read along.  Sort of reviving the online book club format I had with my friends a while back.

One of Our Thursdays is Missing by Jasper Fforde

Budgetary overruns almost buried the remaking before the planning stage, until relief came from an unexpected quarter. A spate of dodgy accounting practices in the Outland necessitated a new genre in Fiction: Creative Accountancy. Shunned by many as `not a proper genre at all,' the members' skills at turning thin air into billion-dollar profits were suddenly of huge use, and the remaking went ahead as planned. Enron may have been a pit of vipers in the Outland, but they quite literally saved the BookWorld.

Bradshaw's BookWorld Companion (16th edition)



from http://www.jasperfforde.com/



When I first received this book in the mail, from Amazon of course, I was excited to see a map drawn on the first few pages.  Every since I read the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, it's been one of my favorite things to see in a book.  I love to compare the location of things as I am reading through the story.  I have to admit I was somewhat confused by the map in this novel since readers of the series know that the layout of bookworld isn't entirely known to the reader or its inhabitants.  After reading the first few chapters I discovered the reason:  Bookworld was being reorganized to more closely resemble the Outland, or Real World.

Told from the point of view of the Written Thursday, what I really like about this novel is that Fforde is not afraid to completely change what we know about this world he's created.  He starts out with a different Thursday as his main character then reshapes the Bookworld.  It really keeps a reader on his or her toes and challenges what we have come to expect from this series.  I feel like I should have gone back and read First Among Sequels before diving into One of Our Thursdays is Missing as a few plot points from the previous novel were fuzzy and I was looking for answers in the new one.  This is clearly my own memory fault and not that of the author's.

Undoubtedly, this is still one of my favorite series and I highly recommend it to anyone.  The basic premise of the series is a character who lives in an alternate-reality Swindon, UK and has the ability to jump into novels and interact with the characters as if they were actors in a play.  Using Written Thursday as the POV on this one allows the reader to learn a little bit more about what it means to be a book character in the Nextian Universe.  Fforde pulls in a lot of our current events into this narrative and even touches on what the invention of e-readers has done to their environment. 

My other favorite quote from the book:

This was the annoying side of the feedback loop; irrespective of how she had once looked or even wanted to look, [the lady of shallot] was now a pre-raphaelite beauty... She wasn't the only one to be physically morphed by reader expectation....Harry Potter was seriously pissed off that he'd have to spend the rest of his life looking like Daniel Radcliffe.

The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy

The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy . . . how can 336 pages about the microeconomic look at how a t-shirt is made (from the beginnings of the US cotton industry to the cotton mills of yesteryear to sweatshops in Asia) and how the history of t-shirt production can be a good way of looking at globalization and the effects of free trade NOT be awesome.

Yes, markets and percentages of GDP and currency fluctuation and Cold War vs Globalization can be confusing if you’re not an MBA student (or hell, sometimes even if you are), but Pietra Rivoli does a pretty decent job offering a narrative that most anyone can understand what she’s talking about.

The big question is – even if you get what she’s talking about, will you find it interesting? Good question. The book starts off a little slow with a specific, detailed, micro look at the cotton industry and its origins in the United States, but really does make you sit back and think about where the t-shirt on your back came from. Whose sweat is responsible for that? Why did the US dominate the cotton industry? Some truths are tragic, others make you realize how great our country has become.

Cotton subsidies, yeah they screw over poor farmers in Africa who don’t have US subsidies and university resources, but at the same time, these poor African countries have their countries working against them (rather than for them as in the US). Sure the US cotton industry came about because of free labor in the form of slavery, but look at what’s it’s developed into and the people its helped.

The poor conditions of US cotton mills matched the poor conditions of British cotton mills decades before and holds a surprising resemblance to cotton mills in Asia at the moment. Are these Asian cotton mills entirely horrible if they eventually lead to skill enhancement and better lives (in the long run) for its people? In Britain and the US, cotton mills led to child labor laws and fair employment laws – whose to say that what led to the independence and well-being of so many people won’t lead to the same for their present-day counterparts?


The author does a great job of remaining impartial – instead of telling the reader that Chinese sweatshops are horrible or that using slavery to advance the cotton industry is bad bad bad – she lets you draw your own conclusion. These things are bad on a humane level, but they led/can lead to greater things.

Dragons of Autumn Twilight by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman




Image from Amazon.com

  My boyfriend suggested the Dragonlance Chronicles, by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, as an interesting read.  I was hesitant to start this series as I have been burned by similar suggestions from former boyfriends.  However, I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised and plan to willingly continue the series.

I knew that the series was based on the Dungeons & Dragons Role-Playing Game and I was wary of how this would translate into a novel.  (I had read a few books based on a similar Vampire RPG and found it repetitive and dry.)  There were a few things that were clearly game based, i.e. the mage's limitations when it came to spell casting, but they weren't so glaringly obvious that I would have noticed if I hadn't been looking for them.

The descriptions of setting were my favorite part of this book.  The authors didn't get lost in them, à la Tolkien, but they certainly painted a vivid picture.  The beginning description of the town of Solace and the Valenwood Forest was so crisp I felt as if I could actually go there to see these massive giants and the town nestled within the branches.  Xak Tsaroth's description makes me feel like I am at the base of Niagra Falls once more, but with an aging city all around me.  Beautiful detail that envelopes the reader and engages the imagination.

The development of characters is a little predictable at times, but no less interesting.  The complicated back stories of Tanis Half-Elven and Raistlin Majere are enticing enough that I want to read more of the series and unravel the mysteries surrounding them.  These two characters, as well, are interesting in their decisions and motivations throughout the novel.  Some of the minor characters in this first book are two dimensional but I hope they are further developed in later novels.

Definitely a book I would recommend to anyone looking for a new fantasy series to read.

February Reading List

January had me unsuccessful in cleaning out the book queue.  I started reading a series that was recommended to me by my boyfriend, so that has taken precedence. To recap, here are the books I have carried over from last year:
The Writer's Tale: The Final Chapter by Russell T. Davies & Benjamin Cook (11/14/10) - Started 11/15/10
Changeless by Gail Carriger (10/16/10) - Started 10/24/10
Twenty Years After by Alexandre Dumas (6/01/10) -Started
A Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin (08/01/10) - Started 10/25/10

Here are the new ones I added in January:

Dragonland Chronicles, Volume I: Dragons of Autumn Twilight by Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman
Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach

Now I just need to stick to it and finish these before heading off-plan again.

"Do As I Say..." Webseries

Okay this is not exactly a book and I am changing the point of my blog to write about this.  But, my sister's high school friend, Andrea Schwartz, and her friend, Kim Kalish, are finished the pre-production on their web-series, "Do As I Say..."  Andrea started talking about it at Cinco de Mayo last year and it sounded really interesting.  Three friends, one of them pregnant with their first child, looking back on their early twenties and deciding to do a video advice gift for the baby.  I'm not sure if that is still the premise, but it's still about ladies in their twenties navigating their way through life, love, and professions in New York City.

One of my favorite parts about their website is their profile description

Kim and Andrea met in college where they majored in Theatre with a minor in Unemployment. In New York, they studied improv and sketch comedy with Upright Citizen's Brigade. They spend most of their time watching cat videos on Youtube.

They are lined up with a professional director, camera crew, lights, etc. so I can't wait to see the finished product.  I am very, very excited for them.  I know it's something on which Andrea has worked very hard and I love it when people see their labors rewarded.  It makes me feel like there is some sort of balance to the universe, or a legitimate reason to try for difficult goals.  Even if they don't fully succeed in this endeavor, for some unknown reason, the experience will be invaluable.  If only to know that you tried to reach that. unreachable. star.....wait this is sounding familiar.

I just really want them to succeed, okay?  If I could take everything that is in my heart right now and turn it into felix felicis, I would.  I am so very proud of Andrea for everything that she is doing.  So please consider visiting their website and backing the development of their series.

I'm Super Girl and I'm Here to Save the World

I’ve always been a dabbler in the comic book world. I know enough to get by in a conversation about the difference between the movie and the comic book (be that X-Men or Batman, so on and so forth).

However, recently I’ve discovered there’s so much more to the comic book world than the simple Batman, Superman, Spiderman, X-Men. Much more. The comic that I’m currently enjoying is the critically acclaimed event 52. 52 was a year-long weekly comic detailing the events of the year after Infinite Crisis in the DC Universe when there is no Batman, Superman, or Wonder Woman. We learn more of the lesser known heroes (Booster Gold, the Question, Black Adam, etc) and see how their lives and stories are all woven together in the DC Universe.

No worries - I won't give away any of the plot since we all hate *spoiler alert* spoilers.

The beauty of the overall story is that you experience the events of the DCU in real-time since each issue took place over a week and was issued every week. There are so many plot-twists and rich character developments that you can’t help but get lost in the story. Not to insult any hard-core comics fans, but the comic reads like a soap opera. You jump into an episode of All My Children and you know who Erica Kane is . . . but Greenlee and Jackson, how do they all fit together? You keep watching and realize everyone in Pine Valley is connected and their stories more complex than you could imagine. Gotham and Metropolis don’t appear to be much different than Pine Valley.

Right so. To sum: politics, mythology, globalization, commercialism, homosexuality, inter-galactic bounty-hunting, and spandex. Lots of spandex.

New Year, New Friends

I have invited a couple of my friends to start posting.  I am hoping that it will bring a little bit of diversity to the blog.  Please let me know if you have any suggestions

Like Me by Chely Wright - Final

I finally finished this biography in its entirety.  I have a great amount of respect for Country Singer, Chely Wright right now.  Though I am a little concerned that at the time the book was written, Chely had not yet come out to her mother.  I hope that she was able to tell her before the book was on store shelves, though I know it was probably difficult.

As I said before, I would recommend this for anyone struggling with their own issues.  Whether it's coming out to your family or having had a family member come out to you.  This isn't a how-to manual, but it does show that there are, indeed, people like you.