What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures

by Malcolm Gladwell

Book Overview

Delve into this "delightful" (Bloomberg News) collection of Malcolm Gladwell's writings from The New Yorker, in which the bestselling author of The Bomber Mafia focuses on "minor geniuses" and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0316076201
• Release Date: December 2010
• Publisher: Back Bay Books
• Length: 448 Pages
• Weight: 0.94 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.3" x 1.4" x 5.7"

Customer Reviews

A brilliant and interesting book about things you never would have thought.

This is filled with all sorts of interesting things like Why it's not just pitbulls that bite. Why Doctors are confused about breast cancer and prostrate problems, really on and on it goes it's very good

Everyone & Everything Has A Story To Tell

"But what if we look at that problem through someone else's eyes, from inside someone else's head?" writes Malcolm Gladwell in his collection of chosen New Yorker magazine articles. Malcolm has certainly succeeded in writing another entertaining and thought provoking book that inspires the reader to look outside their own world and satisfy their curiosity of how others live and work. Curiosities of how people think, day in, day out, in all types of occupations lead us to inventions like the ez squirt Heinz ketchup bottle! Simple, yet amazingly brilliant! Another book I highly recommend is called "Working on Yourself Doesn't Work: The 3 Simple Ideas That Will Instantaneously Transform Your Life" by Ariel & Shya Kane. Their ideas showed me ways to create and maintain a life worth living with satisfaction and meaning. Good news is you can also hear the Kanes on their radio show titled "Being Here". Pick up either book for entertainment but trust me - you will also find inspiration and awe for the wonders of the world you live in and of which you are a part.

Wow, what a surpirsing gem!

I've enjoyed all of Malcolm Gladwell's single-subject books, so I thought I'd give this collection of his articles a chance even though I often find compilations like this to be a let down. I'm positively thrilled I read it. The only drawback may be that my friends and family must be sick to death of listening to me talk about it. A number of things make the book a real standout. The first is Gladwell's own description of what he tries to accomplish when he writes an article. He says he tries to give the reader a sense of "what it feels like" to be the person he's featuring. He does it in spades and throws a lot more into the bargain as well. Amongst the articles, I found a clearer and more engaging explanation of Nassim Taleb's theories than can be found in Taleb's own books. They are brilliant and fascinating and literally gave me new ideas on how to deal with today's stock market conditions. I came to understand why French's mustard has hundreds of successful competitors while Heinz ketchup really has none. I learned better ways to interact with my dog. The list goes on and on. What's so fun is that each article took me into a world different from my own and when I left, I had more than I came in with. Some of it is truly helpful in my life, some will make great cocktail party conversation and some is just fascinating in its own right. Pick this one up and give it a read. I think you'll be glad you did.

Like a provocative comedian, Gladwell chooses familiar rocks

Gladwell's subject matter is intentionally, wildly far flung. In addition, one story will go micro and the next will go macro. He revels in the swing. Like a provocative comedian, Gladwell chooses familiar rocks and then breaks them open for the pay off. He exposes the human motivations and the surrounding group dynamics that contribute to any number of calamities. As a premier American Social Scientist, Gladwell is many things; part intuitive savant, part psychologist and sociologist and part investigative interrogator. Above all these gifts, Gladwell is an excellent story teller. He often tackles huge and complex topics with simple unflappable logic. Gladwell's patented "reveal" is his franchise trademark. First he presents an interesting dynamic or problem. He then presents a second, seemingly unrelated problem. Gladwell toggles between the two stories and rolls them out on two long converging lines, logically inching them forward, step-by-step. At the end of each essay, there is a single resolve with an implicit social commentary, (`... the teacher's have an NFL quarterback problem"). He often concedes that knowing the logical answer won't necessarily change the next inevitable outcome. So rest assured, due to our own human nature, curious Mr. Gladwell will never run short of flamboyant material.

More Interesting & Unique Perspectives

If you're an avid reader of "The New Yorker" over the past decade or so, you probably would've read most of the stories Malcolm Gladwell pieced together to produce this fascinating book; perhaps you would've felt cheated that he's simply rehashing old stuff. Luckily for me, I don't read "The New Yorker", so all of Gladwell's "adventures" that have been compiled for this endeavor are new to me; and I found them to be quite interesting and unique. The end result is a book that anyone with an inquiring mind would certainly enjoy. I loved it. The topics covered in this quirky series of essays are as far-flung as Ron Popeil and the psychology of dogs; whether you find each one to be of interest is debatable. Certainly, what some people would find interesting, would bore others to death. To nit pick each separate chapter would be a futile endeavor; simply enjoy the essence of Gladwell's engaging prose, and explore the fascinating perspective he lends to our crazy existence. In the end, you'll discover a different perspective on a lot of things you never even thought about before; and isn't that the reason for expanding our intellectual horizons? Quite simply, this book accomplishes its mission; I highly recommend reading it for yourself.

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