Mashkoor ALI ALI itibaren Karadikonda, Andhra Pradesh, Hindistan
This is the first book I read when I moved to Los Angeles after college.
I have this book on audio CD read by the author. He is both a wonderful writer and an excellent narrator. I'm sure we'll hear a lot more from him. He's seems to be fairly bursting with fresh ideas, and a new, and uniquely insightful point of view. In this book, Gladwell, a masterful synthesist, skillfully draws from a wide range of fields to support his characteristically intriguing conclusions. He reveals and provides insight into the mostly unconscious mental process by which we actually make most of our important decisions, for which he uses the term "thin-slicing", a skill that can be developed, and at which certain individuals demonstrate exceptionally keen natural acumen, applying it in a wide variety of dissimilar fields. The term thin-slicing was coined by psychologists (led by people like Robert Rosenthal and Nalina Ambady) who were interested in the human tendency to draw conclusions about situations and people based on very "thin slices" of experience. He's also written another book called "The Tipping Point" about how ideas are disseminated through social groups, and populations in general. Here he provides a fascinating explanation of sudden social changes and the development of the fast chains of information that effect a variety of vastly disparate trend patterns. He postulates that they spread in a manner similar to the way in which viruses spread, with implications as to both the controlling and spreading of ideas. This makes sense when you realize that virus cells are made up almost entirely of information in the form of DNA. He's got another book called "Spreading the Idea Virus" which is on my list to read soon.