2001 Reading List

• Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold

• English Passengers by Mathew Kneale

 Well worth a look. Informs and entertains on topics that you didn't know you would be interested in (such as the Manx dialect (from the Isle of Man)).

These comments don't do justice to this fine book ,but I read it many months ago and forgot to jot down my thoughts at the time. This is the price I pay for procrastination.

21 October 2001

• The Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell

It's a bit disingenious of me to include Gladwell's book in my 2001 reading list, because I really read it last year, during my trip to Geneva in December. But here it is, February 2001 and I haven't yet found anything that tickles my fancy (bookwise). So it'll have to do.

The premise of "The Tipping Point" is that, for many significant social phenomena, it is possible to identify key event or circumstances which considered in isolation appear trivial, but which are essential to the growth and development of the phonomena. The resurgence of Hush Puppy shoes is traced to a few hip New Yorkers who start wearing them because they are so uncool, and the next thing you know, the Basset Hound's favourite shoes are so hip its not funny. (As an aside, I had no idea that Hush Puppies had been reincarnated as cool, but then I didn't know they had died either). Extrapolating from this and similar examples, Gladwell argues that if you can identify these key enablers, it is possible to give new ideas or new fads or new products much more momentum than would otherwise be the case.

If you can do this, then more power to you, IMHO. Problem is that I think there is a fair amount of selection bias at work here. Yes there are crucial yet trivial factors that contribute to the evolution of successful fads, but their influence is highly idiosyncratic. By their very nature, these key factors are not reproduceable, but are in fact examples of serindipity. They are relatively easy to spot with the benefit of hindsight, but that is next to useless. Gladwell tries to describe some common characteristics, but in the end I don't think that there is any way to consistently use this to create more powerful forces, any more than describing the movement of the heavens helps to predict the future.

3 February 2001