Plot Summary
What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures is a collection of essays by Malcolm Gladwell which were originally published in The New Yorker. Grouped into three parts, the text gets its name from the fact that each article attempts to tell its story through the eyes of someone who witnessed the events, even if that someone is, in fact, a dog.
The first section, Obsessives, Pioneers, and other varieties of Minor Genius, outlines the stories of several individuals who meet two apparently disparate characteristics. First, these individuals are very good at what they do, to the point of being worthy of being considered leaders in their respective fields. Second, these individuals are all mostly, if not entirely, unknown.
Second is Theories, Predictions, and Diagnosis, which is a section devoted to describing the problems inherent in attempting to make predictions. In this section, Gladwell addresses the famous Enron scandal, as well as the concept of intelligence failure.
Finally, there is Personality, Character, and Intelligence. This final section is dedicated to exploring a wide array of psychological and sociological matters. Topics like criminal profiling and the difference between early and late bloomers are featured in this section.
This collection of essays will give you a great deal to think about. The carefully crafted pieces are able to meaningfully address their topics in the brief space they are each allotted, and may very well leave readers wondering what it is that their dog sees.
Malcolm Gladwell is a British-Canadian author, speaker, and journalist. The author of four bestselling works of nonfiction, Gladwell has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. A graduate of Toronto University’s Trinity College, he was the recipient of the American Sociological Association’s first Award for Excellence in the Reporting of Social Issues in 2007.
“This book was hit or miss for me. Some parts captured my attention, like the birth control or criminal profiling sections, but he spends a lot of time on topics like the Exxon collapse and the stock market, which were a bit more dry. I’d recommend it, but only to jump through at your convenience.”
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Cecilia (4 out of 5 stars)
Publisher Summary
The bestselling author of The Bomber Mafia focuses on “minor geniuses” and idiosyncratic behavior to illuminate the ways all of us organize experience in this “delightful” (Bloomberg News) collection of writings from The New Yorker.
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 20th 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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