Gladwell talked about Bernard Goetz, who shot three obnoxious teenagers on the New York City subway several decades ago, as a starting point for describing his theories on what caused the significant decline in crime which coincided with a campaign to crack down on subway fare jumpers and graffiti. His theory is that when the context in which rampant criminal behavior was considered somehow "normal" was changed to one in which it was unacceptable, the new "normal" was a lower level of all kinds of crime. This and his several other examples of context mostly left the discussion group cold. Several members found many of his points unsubstantiated, and were left with the feeling that Gladwell was confusing correlation with causality. One example that drew particular negative attention was Gladwell's assertion that telephone numbers have seven digits because Bell Telephone knew that this was the maximum number of digits that could be easily remembered. But of course the numbers used to have fewer digits, and now they have more -- so does the one magic moment in time when phone numbers were seven digits long prove anything?
Gladwell would have been better off shoehorning his ideas into a magazine-length article. This way, he could have avoided beating us about the head and shoulders with questionable examples of his interesting ideas. He could have restricted himself to the one very effective example of Paul Revere's Ride, which everyone remembers, because he effectively roused the countryside to revolution. This is in contrast to William Dawes' Ride, which only historians remember, because he did not possess the combined qualities of Connector, Maven and Persuader, which made Revere's efforts so successful.
With the exception of one reader who rated it higher, the group consensus was that this book merited only 1.5 stars.