Malcolm Gladwell

Photo courtesy of Oliver Pelling

Mordecai Richler lived in the UK, and Morley Callaghan and Mavis Gallant both lived in Paris. Like fellow Canadian author Adam Gopnik and no doubt many others, Malcolm Gladwell lives in New York. He works as a staff writer for that cherished magazine, The New Yorker.

Gladwell has also written a number of fascinating and unusual non-fiction books. In Time Magazine, Bill Wadman called Gladwell's book Outliers: the story of success (Little, Brown 2008) "genteel," and also "a frontal assault on the great American myth of the self-made man."

Gladwell himself describes his book Blink: the power of thinking without thinking (Little, Brown 2005) as a book about "the kind of thinking that happens in the blink of an eye...those instant conclusions that we reach" that are "really powerful and really important."

The Tipping Point: how little things can make a big difference (Little, Brown 2000) also created a sensation. Gladwell raises a series of apparently unrelated questions and then connects the answers with a fascinating theory. Without reading the book, it would be a challenge to imagine what these questions have in common:

Why did New York have a dramatic drop in crime in the mid-1990s?
Why are more and more teens smoking even though it's known that cigarettes kill?
Why was there a rash of teenage suicides Micronesia in the 1970s and 80s (ten times the rate of the rest of the world)?

The commonality, says the author, involves the existence and the nature of what he calls "social epidemics." He characterizes this book "an intellectual adventure story," that "draws from psychology and sociology and epidemiology."

In 2005, his name appeared on Time Magazine's list of the 100 most influential people.