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Malcolm Gladwell books in order

Malcolm Gladwell is an English-born Canadian journalist, public speaker, and author of non-fiction books on business and psychology.

Born in England, he holds a bachelor's degree in History from the Trinity College, University of Toronto, and was granted an honorary doctorate by The University of Waterloo in 2007.

Gladwell has so far authored seven books, five of which are New York Times bestsellers, namely: The Tipping Point (2000), Blink (2005), Outliers (2008), What the Dog Saw (2009), and David and Goliath (2013).

He is the co-founder of Pushkin Industries, an audio content company that produces podcasts Revisionist History and Broken Record. The former relooks at things both missed and misunderstood, while the latter hosts interviews with musicians from all manner of genres.

Gladwell has been named in the TIME 100 Most Influential People list, and praised as one of Foreign Policy’s Top Global Thinkers.

More about Malcolm Gladwell

Genre: Non-fiction

Born: 1963

United Kingdom

Website: https://www.gladwellbooks.com/

Non-fiction

  1. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (2000)
  2. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005)
  3. Outliers: The Story of Success (2008)
  4. What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures (2009)
  5. David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (2013)
  6. Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know (2019)
  7. The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War (2021)

Detailed book overview

Non-fiction

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

From the bestselling author of The Bomber Mafia: discover Malcolm Gladwell's breakthrough debut and explore the science behind viral trends in business, marketing, and human behavior. 

The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a small but precisely targeted push cause a fashion trend, the popularity of a new product, or a drop in the crime rate.

This widely acclaimed bestseller, in which Malcolm Gladwell explores and brilliantly illuminates the tipping point phenomenon, is already changing the way people throughout the world think about selling products and disseminating ideas.

Author: Malcolm Gladwell
First Release: 2000
ISBN: 978-0316346627
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

Blink is a book about how we think without thinking, about choices that seem to be made in an instant-in the blink of an eye-that actually aren't as simple as they seem. Why are some people brilliant decision makers, while others are consistently inept? Why do some people follow their instincts and win, while others end up stumbling into error? How do our brains really work-in the office, in the classroom, in the kitchen, and in the bedroom? And why are the best decisions often those that are impossible to explain to others?

In Blink we meet the psychologist who has learned to predict whether a marriage will last, based on a few minutes of observing a couple; the tennis coach who knows when a player will double-fault before the racket even makes contact with the ball; the antiquities experts who recognize a fake at a glance. Here, too, are great failures of "blink": the election of Warren Harding; "New Coke"; and the shooting of Amadou Diallo by police.

Blink reveals that great decision makers aren't those who process the most information or spend the most time deliberating, but those who have perfected the art of "thin-slicing"-filtering the very few factors that matter from an overwhelming number of variables.

Author: Malcolm Gladwell
First Release: 2005
ISBN: 978-0316010665
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Outliers: The Story of Success

In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers"--the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different?

His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing.

Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band.

Brilliant and entertaining, Outliers is a landmark work that will simultaneously delight and illuminate.

Author: Malcolm Gladwell
First Release: 2008
ISBN: 978-0316017930
Publisher: Back Bay Books
What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures

What is the difference between choking and panicking? Why are there dozens of varieties of mustard-but only one variety of ketchup? What do football players teach us about how to hire teachers? What does hair dye tell us about the history of the 20th century?

In the past decade, Malcolm Gladwell has written three books that have radically changed how we understand our world and ourselves: The Tipping Point; Blink; and Outliers. Now, in What the Dog Saw, he brings together, for the first time, the best of his writing from TheNew Yorker over the same period.

Here is the bittersweet tale of the inventor of the birth control pill, and the dazzling inventions of the pasta sauce pioneer Howard Moscowitz. Gladwell sits with Ron Popeil, the king of the American kitchen, as he sells rotisserie ovens, and divines the secrets of Cesar Millan, the "dog whisperer" who can calm savage animals with the touch of his hand.

He explores intelligence tests and ethnic profiling and "hindsight bias" and why it was that everyone in Silicon Valley once tripped over themselves to hire the same college graduate.

Author: Malcolm Gladwell
First Release: 2009
ISBN: 978-0316076203
Publisher: Back Bay Books
David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

Three thousand years ago on a battlefield in ancient Palestine, a shepherd boy felled a mighty warrior with nothing more than a stone and a sling, and ever since then the names of David and Goliath have stood for battles between underdogs and giants. David's victory was improbable and miraculous. He shouldn't have won.

Or should he have?

In David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell challenges how we think about obstacles and disadvantages, offering a new interpretation of what it means to be discriminated against, or cope with a disability, or lose a parent, or attend a mediocre school, or suffer from any number of other apparent setbacks.

Gladwell begins with the real story of what happened between the giant and the shepherd boy those many years ago. From there, David and Goliath examines Northern Ireland's Troubles, the minds of cancer researchers and civil rights leaders, murder and the high costs of revenge, and the dynamics of successful and unsuccessful classrooms—all to demonstrate how much of what is beautiful and important in the world arises from what looks like suffering and adversity.

Author: Malcolm Gladwell
First Release: 2013
ISBN: 978-0316204378
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know

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 one another 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.

Author: Malcolm Gladwell
First Release: 2019
ISBN: 978-0316478526
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War

In The Bomber Mafia, Malcolm Gladwell weaves together the stories of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer, a band of brothers in central Alabama, a British psychopath, and pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard to examine one of the greatest moral challenges in modern American history.

Most military thinkers in the years leading up to World War II saw the airplane as an afterthought. But a small band of idealistic strategists, the “Bomber Mafia,” asked: What if precision bombing could cripple the enemy and make war far less lethal?  

In contrast, the bombing of Tokyo on the deadliest night of the war was the brainchild of General Curtis LeMay, whose brutal pragmatism and scorched-earth tactics in Japan cost thousands of civilian lives, but may have spared even more by averting a planned US invasion. In The Bomber Mafia, Gladwell asks, “Was it worth it?”

Things might have gone differently had LeMay’s predecessor, General Haywood Hansell, remained in charge. Hansell believed in precision bombing, but when he and Curtis LeMay squared off for a leadership handover in the jungles of Guam, LeMay emerged victorious, leading to the darkest night of World War II. The Bomber Mafia is a riveting tale of persistence, innovation, and the incalculable wages of war.

Author: Malcolm Gladwell
First Release: 2021
ISBN: 978-0316296618
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company