(Picture: I was looking for some interesting pictures or better still a video of Malcolm Gladwell giving a speech, but then I settled for my interpretation of his writing style. This is how all his books are, according to me, and capture the reason why I am a half fan of this guy in a nut shell)I love Gladwell's books. They are very thought provoking and fast paced. He picks extremely interesting themes and laces his narrative with a lot of information about research done in that field. His books got me hopelessly hooked to Sociology and made me look at things from a completely different perspective. I was chatting with a resident Sociologist at Google recently and I couldn't help thinking how I would present his research if I were Gladwell.
The USP of Gladwell is the combination of story telling skills and the research he presents. The only issue is that his style of reiteration is so irritating that by the time I get to the half way point, I can't read his books anymore. The picture above explains why.
Though his arguments are quite convincing, I can never completely believe that he is not mixing up causation and correlation. The distrust is more because of his background -- he is a journalist.
I prefer reading his articles in the New Yorker and on his blog (though he has not updated his blog in some time now) to reading his entire book. However, his books fall into the absolutely must read category and I recommend Outliers as the first book that should be read followed by others in any order.
BTW, this post is dedicated to Abhijit Gogoi :)