Revenge of the Tipping Point Study Guide

Gladwell was born in Hampshire, England. His mother was a psychotherapist, and his father was a mathematics professor. He studied history at the University of Toronto and also took an early interest in journalism. After college, he spent several years writing as a journalist for conservative publications before eventually accepting a position at The Washington Post covering business and science. In 1996, he started writing for The New Yorker, where he developed some of the ideas that would form the basis for his books and where he still writes today. In 2000, he published The Tipping Point, which launched his career as one of the bestselling authors of contemporary nonfiction books. His books Blink and Outliers were also highly successful and introduced several concepts into popular culture, in particular the idea that it takes 10,000 hours to be successful at an endeavor. Gladwell’s subsequent books have continued to sell well, and Gladwell has branched out into other fields like podcasting and founding the website Grantland. He currently lives with his family in Hudson, New York.

Revenge of the Tipping Point looks primarily at the United States in the 20th and 21st centuries. One of the main issues that comes up in several chapters is racism. Gladwell references “White flight,” when White residents of cities moved to the suburbs in large numbers during the mid-20th century, often due to paranoia that the presence of the new Black residents would bring crime. There are various reasons why Black Americans began to migrate north and move to major cities: harsher discrimination in the rural South, the creation of a new interstate highway system that made travel easier, and new opportunities arising from desegregation and the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In more recent history, Gladwell devotes the final section of the book to the opioid epidemic. Beginning in the 1990s, abuse of prescription painkillers spiked in the U.S. and spread to other parts of the world as well. This epidemic arose from a variety of factors, including new theories of treating pain, more addictive formulations of painkillers, and the way pharmaceutical companies prioritized profit over public safety.

Revenge of the Tipping Point is a sequel to The Tipping Point, Gladwell’s first book. These books fall into the genre of popular science, more specifically popular sociology. Some other books in this genre published in between The Tipping Point and its sequel include The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker, Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Steven J. Dubner, and The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. The previous generation of popular science nonfiction writers included Carl Sagan (Cosmos), Stephen Hawking (A Brief History of Time), and  Stephen Jay Gould (Full House), all of whom influenced Gladwell. While Gladwell’s books generally don’t fall into the self-help genre, they do have some overlap, with the concept of 10,000 hours from his book Outliers becoming a well-known self-help principal. Books about self-improvement go back to ancient times, but the modern history of the self-help book is often thought to have begun with Dale Carnegie’s 1936 book How to Win Friends and Influence People.