Malcolm Gladwell Books

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The wildly opinionated, thoroughly entertaining, and arguably definitive book on the past, present, and future of the NBA—from the founder of The Ringer and host of The Bill Simmons Podcast “Enough provocative arguments to fuel barstool arguments far into the future.”—The Wall Street Journal In The Book of Basketball, Bill Simmons opens—and then closes, once and for all—every major NBA debate, from the age-old question of who actually won the rivalry between Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain to the one about which team was truly the best of all time. Then he takes it further by completely reevaluating not only how NBA Hall of Fame inductees should be chosen but how the institution must be reshaped from the ground up, the result being the Pyramid: Simmons’s one-of-a-kind five-level shrine to the ninety-six greatest players in the history of pro basketball. And ultimately he takes fans to the heart of it all, as he uses a conversation with one NBA great to uncover that coveted thing: The Secret of Basketball. Comprehensive, authoritative, controversial, hilarious, and impossible to put down (even for Celtic-haters), The Book of Basketball offers every hardwood fan a courtside seat beside the game’s finest, funniest, and fiercest chronicler.

Why are people successful? For centuries, humankind has grappled with this question, searching for the secret to accomplishing great things. In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an invigorating intellectual journey to show us what makes an extreme overachiever.

A brilliant new book from the bestselling author of The Tipping Point and Blink Why are people successful? For centuries, humankind has grappled with this question, searching for the secret to accomplishing great things. In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an invigorating intellectual journey to show us what makes an extreme overachiever. He reveals that we pay far too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where successful people are from: their culture, their family, and their generation. Gladwell examines how the careers of Bill Gates and the performance of world-class football players are alike; what top fighter pilots and The Beatles have in common; why so many top lawyers are Jewish; why Asians are good at maths; and why it is correct to say that the mathematician who solved Fermat's Theorem is not a genius. Just as he did in Blink, Gladwell overturns many of our conventional notions and creates an entirely new model for seeing the world. Brilliant and entertaining, this is a landmark work that will simultaneously delight and illuminate.

The Tipping Point is the biography of an idea, and the idea is quite simple: that many of the problems we face - from murder to teenage delinquency to traffic jams - behave like epidemics. They aren't linear phenomena in the sense that they steadily and predictably change according to the level of effort brought to bear against them. They are capable of sudden and dramatic changes in direction. Years of well-intentioned intervention may have no impact at all, yet the right intervention - at just the right time - can start a cascade of change.

Malcolm Gladwell intertwines the narratives of a Dutch genius with a homemade computer, a group of brothers in Alabama, a British psychopath, and pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard to explore a significant moral dilemma in modern American history. In the lead-up to World War II, most military strategists dismissed the airplane's potential. However, a group known as the "Bomber Mafia" proposed a radical idea: could precision bombing of key industrial and transportation hubs incapacitate the enemy and reduce overall casualties? In his podcast, Revisionist History, Gladwell revisits historical moments to question whether initial judgments were correct. In this work, he reflects on the bombing of Tokyo, the war's deadliest night, and ponders its justification. The attack stemmed from General Curtis LeMay's ruthless tactics, which resulted in thousands of civilian deaths but may have prevented a more extensive US invasion. The outcome might have differed had General Haywood Hansell, a key Bomber Mafia member advocating for precision bombing, remained in command. His strategies were thwarted by adverse conditions and human error. The clash between Hansell and LeMay in Guam ultimately led to a tragic turning point in the war. This narrative captures the themes of persistence, innovation, and the profound costs of warfare.

Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Revisionist History and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Outliers, offers a powerful examination of our interactions with strangers--and why they often go wrong . How did Fidel Castro fool the CIA for a generation? Why did Neville Chamberlain think he could trust Adolf Hitler? Why are campus sexual assaults on the rise? Do television sitcoms teach us something about the way we relate to each other that isn't true? Talking to Strangers is a classically Gladwellian intellectual adventure, a challenging and controversial excursion through history, psychology, and scandals taken straight from the news. He revisits the deceptions of Bernie Madoff, the trial of Amanda Knox, the suicide of Sylvia Plath, the Jerry Sandusky pedophilia scandal at Penn State University, and the death of Sandra Bland---throwing our understanding of these and other stories into doubt. Something is very wrong, Gladwell argues, with the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don't know. And because we don't know how to talk to strangers, we are inviting conflict and misunderstanding in ways that have a profound effect on our lives and our world. In his first book since his #1 bestseller, David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell has written a gripping guidebook for troubled times.

Intuition is often presented as the opposite of structured achievement. There are people who intuit the answer to a problem, and there are those who work it out the long and hard way. This distinction is false: intuitive facilities turn out to be gifts that are developed and educated by practice and experience.

Malcolm Gladwell's dazzling and provocative exploration of why everything we think we know about power is wrong What if everything we thought about power was wrong? What if, in the ancient story of the shepherd boy who topples a giant, David actually had the advantage? This thought sets Malcolm Gladwell on an extraordinary journey that takes him from art to basketball, the brain to revolutions, along the way weaving unforgettable stories of misfits, outsiders, tricksters and underdogs who have faced outsized challenges and won. With his trademark warmth, humour and gift for showing us the world through new eyes, Gladwell lets us see why the powerful aren't always what we think they are - and that some of us have more strength and purpose than we could ever imagine.

The routine traffic stop that ends in tragedy. The spy who spends years undetected at the highest levels of the Pentagon. The false conviction of Amanda Knox. Why do we so often get other people wrong? Why is it so hard to detect a lie, read a face or judge a stranger's motives? Through a series of encounters and misunderstandings - from history, psychology and infamous legal cases - Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual adventure into the darker side of human nature, where strangers are never simple and misreading them can have disastrous consequences. No one challenges our shared assumptions like Malcolm Gladwell. Here he uses stories of deceit and fatal errors to cast doubt on our strategies for dealing with the unknown, inviting us to rethink our thinking in these troubled times.