What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

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 )

"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 )

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?

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; 1 edition (October 20, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316075841
• ISBN-13: 978-0316075848
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.8 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #23 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

118 of 122 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "A unique perspective on the complexity of the human mind.", October 20, 2009

By	E. Bukowsky "booklover10" (NY United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Malcolm Gladwell's "What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures" is a compilation of the author's favorite work from The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1996. This book is divided into three parts 1. Obsessives, Pioneers, and Other Varieties of Minor Genius 2. Theories, Predictions, and Diagnoses 3. Personality, Character, and Intelligence. In the first part, Gladwell includes portraits of a pitchman for kitchen gadgets who is so persuasive that he could sell clothing to a nudist. In addition, he discusses three female advertising pioneers, a canny investment strategist, and a "dog whisperer" who is able to tame even the most intransigent canine. What these people have in common is an understanding of how human beings (and four-legged creatures) think and feel, supreme self-confidence, and the ability to promote themselves and their ideas. The second part deals with the art of thinking and seeing clearly. Gladwell describes the series of events that led to the Challenger explosion and the collapse of Enron. Could these catastrophic events have been foreseen and prevented? In part three, the author discusses various aspects of genius and talent, and whether it is possible to profile criminal behavior or predict how a prospective employee will fare on the job.

"What the Dog Saw" has some intriguing passages that will impel readers to say, "I never thought of this subject in quite that way before." The provocative Gladwell enjoys toying with conventional wisdom and challenging our preconceived notions. For instance, in one article, he defends certain forms of plagiarism, a transgression that many would consider indefensible. In another, he states that tragedies such as the Challenger disaster are unavoidable, since for a variety of reasons, "we don't really want the safest of all possible worlds." This water-cooler book will have people arguing vehemently that Malcolm Gladwell is either out of his mind or, conversely, that he is a courageously honest writer who dares to tell it like it is.

Unfortunately, there are several dreary chapters, including one that analyzes why one particular brand of ketchup is so popular and another that explores the poor judgment of John Rock, the inventor of the birth control pill. In addition, Gladwell occasionally indulges in hair-splitting: Do most of us really care about the fine distinctions between panicking and choking? On the other hand, there is a fascinating section that explains why mammograms, as a diagnostic tool, are inexact and hard to interpret. In addition, Gladwell makes a good case for the notion that intelligence failures, such as the ones that preceded 9/11, are easy to condemn in hindsight but may be more understandable when viewed in context. Malcolm Gladwell's strength has always been his ability to tell an original and entertaining story and connect it to our everyday experiences. He does just that in his best pieces, but there are others that probably should not have made the cut.

26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars exploring aspects of human psyche - article by article, October 21, 2009

By	Sreeram Ramakrishnan (Salem,MA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

In a compendium of previously published articles (as old as 1996 and as recent as 2008), Gladwell attempts to provide a unique window to the human psyche mostly in terms of its creativity, inventiveness, decision making and biases. While the articles themselves are very engaging read and informative, the compendium-of-best-articles, leaves the reader fairly direction-less due to the lack of an explicit theme or an overarching premise to contextualize the articles. Moreover, Gladwell doesn't use the opportunity to self-critique older articles and provide any additional insights that would have significantly helped the reader. Gladwell fans and frequent users of his website/blog may find the lack of new material disappointing.

In the first part Gladwell zigzags his way through kitchen gadgets, ketchup, Wall Street, hair dyes, birth control and dog whisperers. The range of the topics, notwithstanding, the reader is treated to unique glimpses of "hidden extraordinary" as the book jacket frames it. (Other reviewers have talked about the contents in the other two parts, but expect a wide plethora of topics) In a way, the lack of cohesiveness of the topics encourages the reader to wander to very different topics which oftentimes leads to surprising insights. The articles being written at different times shouldn't be expected to be able to maintain a uniform sense of engagement or interest to the reader.

After reading through the entire book,the reader is likely to have come across few instances or discussions that will force you to rethink, but overall, the book doesn't provide a relatively succinct theme or question such as the Outliers did for understanding success or the Tipping Point's take on ideas or Blink's take on gut responses. As entertaining and interesting a compendium this turned out to be, a reader will need to manage expectations with respect to this collection of articles.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars If you don't need the actual physical book..., November 16, 2009

By	Donne Donne (Morningside Heights) - See all my reviews

Not a review so much as a notice. If you don't need the actual book itself, you should know that all of these pieces are available on Malcolm Gladwell's website for free.