Malcolm Gladwell 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.
