What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures

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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 20^th 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.

"Good writing," Gladwell says in his preface, "does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head."What the Dog Saw is yet another example of the buoyant spirit and unflagging curiosity that have made Malcolm Gladwell our most brilliant investigator of the hidden extraordinary.

Customer Reviews ::

Disappointing - Jiang Xueqin - Toronto, Canada
How do we even go about understanding that publishing and cultural phenomenon that is Malcolm Gladwell, who has made millions by writing in sometimes eloquent and compelling, but mainly clear and prosaic language the bleeding obvious. He is not as brilliant as Michael Lewis, who sometimes has profound and important things to say -- read "Liar's Poker" to understand why Wall Street ultimately had to implode, and read "Moneyball" to understand how to properly manage and do business in this world. But Gladwell comes across as someone who's nice and decent and humble, and if someone had to succeed in publishing most people would choose him over the arrogant and neurotic depressives in the publishing world.

Gladwell's decency is so obvious in his prose. He doesn't challenge, and he doesn't condescend. He's just looking for the truth, even if he may not possess neither the logical reasoning skills nor the experience required to understand the truth. There are many holes in his arguments, and his arguments will either be entirely obvious or flawed, but flawed in a way that caters to the prejudices of the Upper East Side liberal crowd that control publishing. We do not expect Gladwell to tell us something we don't know or that outrageously challenges our sense of things -- rather, he just adds a new insight or example that already confirms our understanding of things -- that there are problems in this world, but they can be fixed, and if they can't the world is still a good righteous place to live in. There is no darkness and no depth in Gladwell's writings -- just a lot of cotton candy and floss.

"Outliers" is really Gladwell's best book, and the book he'll be remembered for, if at all. "What the Dog Saw" is a collection of his New Yorker articles that demonstrate how superficial and lame his reporting, thinking, and writing truly are.

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