Product Description

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?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2116 in Books
• Published on: 2009-10-20
• Released on: 2009-10-20
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 410 pages

Review
GREAT PRAISE FOR WHAT THE DOG SAW:

"[Malcolm Gladwell] is one of the brightest stars in the media firmament...Gladwell's clear prose and knack for upending conventional wisdom across the social sciences have made The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers, as well as his lengthy magazine features on topics ranging from cool-hunting to ketchup, into must reads." (Time.com Alex Altman )

"This evidence of a Gladwell effect helps to predict something larger: that Mr. Gladwell's new book will be as successful as his first three...This book full of short conversation pieces is a collection that plays to the author's strengths. It underscores his way of finding suitably quirky subjects (the history of women's hair-dye advertisements; the secret of Heinz's unbeatable ketchup; even the effects of women's changing career patterns on the number of menstrual periods they experience in their lifetimes) and using each as gateway to some larger meaning." (New York Times Janet Maslin )

"Gladwell is a writer of many gifts. His nose for the untold back story will have readers repeatedly muttering, "Gee, that's interesting!" He avoids shopworn topics, easy moralization and conventional wisdom, encouraging his readers to think again and think different...Some chapters are masterpieces in the art of the essay." (The New York Times Book Review Steven Pinker )

"Uniformly delightful...Malcolm Gladwell can write engrossingly about just about anything...His witty, probing articles are as essential to David Remnick's New Yorker as those of Wolcott Gibbs and A.J. Liebling were to Harold Ross's...Gladwell has a gift for capturing personalities, a Borscht Belt comic's feel for timing and a bent for counterintuitive thinking. He loves to start a piece by settling you onto a cushion of received ideas, then yanking it out from under you."- (Bloomberg News Craig Seligman )

"Malcolm Gladwell triumphantly returns to his roots with this collections of his great works from The New Yorker Magazine....Do yourself a favor and curl up with What the Dog Saw this week: It is more entertaining and edifying than should be legal for any book." (Louisville Courier-Journal Scott Coffman )

"In What the Dog Saw, Malcolm Gladwell leads the reader on delightful side excursions, shows with insightful conversation how one path interweaves with another, and suggests meaning-he is, in short, an interpretative naturalist of American culture." (The Oregonian Alice Evans )

About the Author
Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer for The New Yorker. He was formerly a business and science reporter at the Washington Post.

Customer Reviews

Exploring the human mind in unique essays
Malcolm Gladwell has done it again in that he's written an interesting book about the human condition. To be fair, it's not really a book per se. It is a collection of previously published New Yorker articles. Since I don't read the New Yorker, they were new to me. If you're a regular follower, this will probably be a book of deja vu.

The book is split into three broad sections: 1. Obsessives, Pioneers, and Other Varieties of Minor Genius 2. Theories, Predictions, and Diagnoses 3. Personality, Character, and Intelligence. Each section has several essays that generally discuss the themes, and they cover a lot of varied ground. Some of the essays, like the one of Ron Popeil (Ronco Food guy from TV) were quite interesting. Others, like the article on ketchup, where a little less interesting. It's not so much that some articles were better written than others, but that the subject material is so varied that you're bound to like certain topics/ideas more than others (there are other kinds of ketchup on the shelves, saw them today- spicy and mexican to name two, plus I kind of think of steak sauce, some salsas, and BBQ sauce as alternate forms of ketchup).

Overall, the book had less impact than some of his previous work (e.g., Tipping Point) where he took one idea and really developed it. Still, as light reading, this book is a good buy. The essays are self-contained, so it's pretty easy to pick it up, read for a while, then put it down again without worried about losing track of an argument or line of thought. The wide range of topics make it likely that most readers will enjoy at least some, but probably not all, of the essays. So if you like Gladwell's other books, and are looking for something similarly amusing, but a little lighter, than this is probably going to be a good (if not great) book for you.

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 Outliers, 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.

What the Dog Saw
Malcolm Gladwell has written several books: The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers, all of which I have read. This one "What the Dog Saw" is a collection of essays he has written over the past ten years.

Some of the essays were attention-grabbing and some were not; the book contains a wide range of topics and depending on the person reading the book, some will be intriguing and some will seem tedious.

The essays cover such topics as the discovery of the birth control by a dedicated Catholic who thought his discovery was in synch with his church's teachings, but as it turns out that Catholic Church thought the opposite. There is an essay that explains about designer mustards and why they were successful, but why designer ketchups cannot capture the market from Heinz. Other topics include the influence of hair dye in women's lives, plagiarism, Enron's problems, and all sorts of other stories.

This book is a simple read and it does keep ones attention, but I found it lacking in cohesion. The topics while educational just do not seem to pull together to make a whole. I finished the book and felt like the book was just a collection of random essays. They do have some consistency, but I get the general feeling of disjointedness. I favour his other three books.