What The Dog Saw Gladwell, Malcolm

Articles previously published in The New Yorker.

From the Publisher:
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.

Annotation:
After his first book reached a tipping point and became a runaway bestseller, Malcolm Gladwell shot to stardom in a blink and became an outlier in the realm of popular nonfiction. But those who have only read Gladwell in book form have been missing out on some of his most intriguing insights and ideas, which have appeared in his delightfully eclectic and captivating articles for The New Yorker. This volume collects the best of those pieces, on topics including (but not limited to): hair dye, homelessness, kitchen utensils, birth control, criminal profiling, dog training, Enron, plagiarism, NASA, choke artists, job interviews, ketchup and mustard, the nature of intelligence, black swans, pattern fallacy, pit bulls, and, perhaps most famously, spaghetti sauce. Gladwell's ability to weave the tangled threads of our culture into a tapestry of singular wisdom is unparalleled, and this essential anthology of his essays allows readers to observe as he gleans fundamental truths from an astounding array of evidence.

Author Bio

Malcolm Gladwell

In his Acknowledgments to THE TIPPING POINT, Malcolm Gladwell tells how he got his dream job at the New Yorker magazine: a freelancer, he wrote a piece (which he later expanded to THE TIPPING POINT) and the editor at the time, Tina Brown, hired him "to my surprise and delight." At the New Yorker he is obligated to produce 40-50,000 words per year, he has said on his website, but he is free to write "about everything under the sun." Gladwell's two books, THE TIPPING POINT and BLINK spent many weeks on the New York Times hardcover and paperback best seller lists--sometimes appearing simultaneously. His engaging forays into pop culture and everyday life are revealing keyholes into how we live today, and since he is a good explainer he just makes things more interesting than they usually appear. Gladwell has a history degree from Trinity College, University of Toronto, and he spent years working for the Washington Post.

Praise

"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...and using each as gateway to some larger meaning. It illustrates how often he sets up one premise...only to destroy it....This book's voice always sounds level-headed, whether it is describing ketchup being tasted or pit bulls attacking a boy. It tames visceral events by approaching them scientifically." - Janet Maslin 10/20/2009

"What makes Malcolm Gladwell...so extraordinary is his ability to focus on any topic from the arcane to the apparently banal, research it with shrewd intelligence and wholehearted engagement, then weave in other thoughts and themes that may seem unrelated until he subtly illuminates their relevance. The result is unfailingly riveting." - Amanda Heller 11/01/2009

"...Gladwell displays an easy-going writing style and a sharp critical mind. This is the kind of essay collection you can read from cover to cover or, just as satisfactorily, dip into a bit at a time." - David Pitt 10/15/2009

"Gladwell is a writer of many gifts....He avoids shopworn topics, easy moralization and conventional wisdom, encouraging his readers to think again and think different. His prose is transparent, with lucid explanations and a sense that we are chatting with the experts ourselves. Some chapters are masterpieces in the art of essay....But [he] frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring." - Steven Pinker 11/15/2009

"Gladwell is an old-fashioned control freak, a master essayist who obeys the imperative of his generation -- Thou Shalt Appear Effortless. Here's what you thought you knew, he tells us. Here's what it looks like from another angle -- the angle of failure, say, or the point of view of the dog being whispered to, or the writer whose work has been plagiarized. Before you get all up about something, take a look at which buttons are being pressed...." - Susan Salter Reynolds 11/22/2009

Product Attributes

Book Format:		Paperback
Number of Pages:		0410
Publisher:		Back Bay Books

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What The Dog Saw And Other Adventures (Paperback)

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