What the Dog Saw

And Other Adventures

By: Malcolm Gladwell

Narrated by: Malcolm Gladwell

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.

Gladwell at his best

If you've read any of Gladwell's other books, this will sound like a lot of mini-books put together - and that's because that's what this is. I'm a big fan and love the way he puts his arguments. In many of these stories, he doesn't come to a conclusion, but rather (as he puts it in the introduction) tries to engage us in the story and make us think about it. It's wonderful to see how mundane topics that we'd never think twice about can be wonderful stories.
He's also a great narrator of his books.

Maybe the best

This ended up, so far, being my favorite of the Gladwell books, even though it's all reprints. I knew none of the essays before and was very glad to find them. A couple of them are nearly perfect in structure and language craft. All are very good; some are worth multiple reads. All are Gladwellian in approach, but more focused and structured than the full-length books. Some were precursors to the existing books; some, I hope, are precursors of other books. I enjoy hearing Gladwell read his own work; that's a bonus. I can't imagine another doing as well.

Felt a little bit like an infomercial

I recommend pretty much every book by Gladwell except this one. I'm still glad I listened to this book even though it wasn't his best.

There were some interesting points made in this book but nothing you couldn't get out of all the other books by Malcolm Gladwell.

So so

Interesting articles, but doesn't seem to come together. Some parts of this book were very boring. This pains me to say, because I am a huge fan of Malcolm's Blink, Tipping Point and Outliers

Fantastic as always

I have read or listened to almost all of Malcom Gladwell’s books and this is no exception. Deep, entertaining and insightful.