Product Description

Malcolm Gladwell is the master of playful yet profound insight. His ability to see underneath the surface of the seemingly mundane taps into a fundamental human impulse: curiosity. From criminology to ketchup, job interviews to dog training, Malcolm Gladwell takes everyday subjects and shows us surprising new ways of looking at them, and the world around us. Are smart people overrated? What can pit bulls teach us about crime? Why are problems like homelessness easier to solve than to manage? How do we hire when we can’t tell who’s right for the job? Gladwell explores the minor geniuses, the underdogs and the overlooked, and reveals how everyone and everything contains an intriguing story. What the Dog Saw is Gladwell at his very best – asking questions and seeking answers in his inimitable style.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #281 in Books
• Published on: 2009-10-20
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 432 pages

Review
Gladwell’s range is impressive and his writing never less than engaging (FT )

The pieces form a dazzling record of Gladwell's art (Guardian )

Vibrant, colourful and packed with surprises (Guardian )

Make your social commentary sparkle with Malcolm Gladwell’s latest (Sunday Times )

He’s able to examine what look like the most mundane aspects of our daily lives and to reveal the cleverness – and the strangeness – within (Sunday Telegraph )

Gladwell soars high (Spectator )

About the Author
Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer with The New Yorker magazine since 1996. In 2005 he was named one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People. He is the author of The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference (2000), Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005) and most recently, Outliers (2008) all three of which were number one New York Times bestsellers.

Customer Reviews

What Malcolm learned....

One man's opinion, Malcolm Gladwell is at his best when writing essays for magazines (notably The New Yorker) or when writing Outliers: The Story of Success, his most recently published book. (I do not share others' enthusiasm for his earlier books, The Tipping Point and Blink.) In it, he provides a rigorous and comprehensive examination of the breakthrough research conducted by Anders Ericsson and his associates at Florida State. One of the major research projects focuses on individuals who have "attained their superior performance by instruction and extended practice: highly skilled performers in the arts, such as music, painting and writing, sports, such as swimming, running and golf and games, such as bridge and chess." Geoff Colvin (in Talent Is Overrated) and Daniel Coyle (in The Talent Code) also discuss the same research.

In this volume, we have 19 of Gladwell's essays, all of which originally appeared in The New Yorker. They are organized within three Parts: Obsessives, Pioneers, and Other Varieties of Minor Genius (e.g. "The Pitchman: Ron Popeil and the Conquest of the American Kitchen"); Theories, Predictions, and Diagnoses (e.g. "Million-Dollar Murray: Why Problems Like Homelessness May Be Easier to Solve Than Manage"); and Personality, Character, and Intelligence (e.g. "Dangerous Minds: Criminal Profiling Made Easy"). In the Preface, Gladwell observes, "Curiosity about the inner life of other people's day-to-day work is one of the most funfamental of human impulses, and that same impulse is what led to the writing you now hold in your hands."

The title of the book is also the title of one of the essays in which Gladwell provides a profile of "The Dog Whisperer," Cesar Millan, the owner of the Dog Psychology Center in South-Central Los Angeles whose television program is now featured on the National Geographic channel. Although a long-time dog owner, I did not know - until reading this article - that dogs are really interested in humans. Interested, observes anthropologist Brian Hare, "to the point of obsession. To a dog, you are a giant walking tennis ball." Apparently to an extent no other animal can, a dog can "read" humans like the proverbial open book. What they "see" determines how they will react. The key to Millan's effectiveness with dogs is his understanding of their need for exercise, discipline, and affection. What he calls an "epiphany" occurred when he realized that they have their own psychology. For him, he realized this, it was "the most important moment in his life, because it was the moment when he understood that to succeed in the world he could not be just a dog whisperer. He needed to be a people whisperer." According to Gladwell, "A dog cares, deeply, which way your body is leaning. Forward or backward? Forward can be seen as aggressive; backward - even a quarter of an inch - means nonthreatening. It means you've relinquished what ethologists call an intentional movement to proceed forward." Ethologist Patricia McConnell and the author of The Other End of the Leash adds, "I believe they pay a tremendous amount of attention to how relaxed our face is and how relaxed our facial muscles are, because that's a big cue for them with each other."

Gladwell seems to have an insatiable curiosity about individuals, situations, and locations that may be, at least unitially, of little interest to others...until he shares what he has learned about them. Ketchup, for example. It is essential to my enjoyment of burgers, meatloaf, and french fries and yet I assumed that all ketchup is the same. Not so! In "The Ketchup Conundrum," Gladwell explains that tomato ketchup "is a nineteenth-century creation - the union of the English tradition of fruit and vegetable sauces and the growing American infatuation with the tomato. But what we know today as ketchup emerged outof a debate that raged in the first years of the last century over benzoate, a preservative widely used in the late-nineteenth century condiments." When I first read this essay in 2004, I was tempted to stop at this point. A debate about benzoate? A condiment controversy? Who cares? It is to Gladwell's credit that he rewarded my continuing to read the article by providing some truly interesting information about a subject in which I had little (if any) prior interest.

The next article in the anthology, "Blowing Up: How Nassim Taleb Turned the Inevitability of Disaster Into an Investment Strategy,"an article first published in 2002. Over a period of many months, Gladwell spent a great deal of time with Nassim Nicholas Taleb, founder and CEO of a hedge fund, Empirica Capital. "Taleb likes to quote David Hume: `No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.'...[Taleb] has constructed a trading philosophy predicated entirely on the existence of black swans, on the possibilty of some random, unexpected event sweeping the markets. He never sells options, then. He only buys them. He's never the one who can lose a great deal of money if GM stock suddenly plunges. Nor does her ever bet on the market moving in one direction or anitger. That would require Traleb to assume that he understands the market, and he doesn't." Years later, he wrote a book he called The Black Swan and during the subsequent financial crisis of 2008-2009 "made a staggering amount of money for his fund."

In this article and in all of the others, Gladwell demonstrates the skills of a world-class cultural anthropologist as he seeks out information from a wide variety of sources, interviews authorities on the given subject, observes behavior of those involved in the given activities, and then explains to the extent possible - in layman's terms - what the meaning and significance of what he has learned. Each article is a gem. Together in one volume, they are a treasure.

Disappointed loyal reader
Quite clear this book was strategically released right after Outliers, from the same author. Outliers is a brilliant book and the editors clearly wanted to get ride on the good momentum that book created for the author. Unfortunately I feel in the trap. I read everything Malcolm releases but this book is not like his previous books (Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers). This is a collection of his publications in The New Yorker but they are no near as interesting or insightful as the stories from his previous books. Some of them as simply boring and you end up asking yourself what is the point of the last pages you've just read. Buy everything else Malcolm writes, just don't buy this book... Editors and Author simply got greedy for money.

Curiosity About the Commonplace Yields New Perspectives

"You, who have shown me great and severe troubles,
Shall revive me again,
And bring me up again from the depths of the earth." -- Psalm 71:20

Before thinking about buying or reading this book, please be aware that all the articles were originally published in The New Yorker. If you are a loyal reader of that excellent publication, you may well have read all these articles before.

The strength of Mr. Gladwell's writing in these non-fiction articles is his ability to become fascinated with something that most people either don't notice . . . or don't long think about. With the persistence of a terrier, he keeps asking questions until some new perspectives appear. In almost all cases, these new perspectives will advance your thinking from where it is today. Unfortunately, in some cases, his curiosity will leave you short of satisfying answers to new questions that his writing raises.

Some of the articles are either brilliant . . . or just short of being so, listed here in the order in which they appear:

Blowing Up: How Nassim Taleb Turned the Inevitability of Disaster into an Investment Strategy
What the Dog Saw: Cesar Millan and the Movements of Mastery
Million-Dollar Murray: Why Problems Like Homelessness May Be Easier to Manage Than to Solve
Connecting the Dots: The Paradoxes of Intelligence Reform
Late Bloomers: Why Do We Equate Genius with Precocity?
Most Likely to Succeed: How Do We Hire When We Can't Tell Who's Right for the Job?

Some of the other stories don't work nearly as well as they might have:

The Pitchman: Ron Popeil and the Conquest of the American Kitchen (doesn't have enough development of why we like to buy gadgets pitched on television)
The Ketchup Conundrum: Mustard Now Comes in Dozens of Varieties. Why Has Ketchup Stayed the Same? (focuses on taste research in the context of a poorly designed ketchup product rather than the question that's stated)
True Colors: Hair Dye and the Hidden History of Postwar America (too slim a premise to capture the important shifts in female self-image)
John Rock's Error: What the Inventor of the Birth Control Pill Didn't Know About Women's Health (the article's point is pushed too far, assuming that Catholic doctrine can be predicted based on health benefits)
Open Secrets: Enron, Intelligence, and the Perils of Too Much Information (doesn't succeed either as an expose or fully as irony)
The Picture Problem: Mammography, Air Power, and the Limits of Looking (too much information for what the subject will bear)
Something Borrowed: Should a Charge of Plagiarism Ruin Your Life? (too speculative to be very helpful)
Dangerous Minds: Criminal Profiling Made Easy (the point is hammered a little too hard)
The Talent Myth: Are Smart People Overrated? (the point is too obvious to keep our interest)

A few of the stories just didn't seem worth including:

The Art of Failure: Why Some People Choke and Others Panic (not much content here)
Blowup: Who Can Be Blamed for a Disaster like the Challenger Explosion? No One, and We'd Better Get Used to It (the point is pretty obscure and I suspect many people won't be interested)
The New-Boy Network: What Do Job Interviews Really Tell Us? (much ado about first impressions)
Troublemakers: What Pit Bulls Can Teach Us About Crime (much data about the dangers of drawing conclusions from impressions of popular press reports)

At any rate, you'll have lots of new information to use for dinner conversation, if nothing else.

Have fun!