What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures

by Malcolm Gladwell

Paperback, 2010

Call number

814.6 GLA

Publication

Back Bay Books (2010), Edition: Reprint, 448 pages

Description

Brings together, for the first time, the best of Gladwell's writing from The New Yorker in the past decade, including: the bittersweet tale of the inventor of the birth control pill; the dazzling inventions of the pasta sauce pioneer Howard Moscowitz; spotlighting Ron Popeil, the king of the American kitchen; and the secrets of Cesar Millan, the "dog whisperer." Gladwell also explores intelligence tests, ethnic profiling and "hindsight bias," and why it was that everyone in Silicon Valley once tripped over themselves to hire the same college graduate.

Media reviews

The themes of the collection are a good way to characterize Gladwell himself: a minor genius who unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of statistical reasoning and who occasionally blunders into spectacular failures.
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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 (the history of women’s hair-dye advertisements; the secret of Heinz’s unbeatable ketchup; even the effects of women’s changing career
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patterns on the number of menstrual periods they experience in their lifetimes) and using each as gateway to some larger meaning. It illustrates how often he sets up one premise (i.e. that crime profiling helps track down serial killers) only to destroy it.
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Gladwell has divided his book into three sections. The first deals with what he calls obsessives and minor geniuses; the second with flawed ways of thinking. The third focuses on how we make predictions about people: will they make a good employee, are they capable of great works of art, or are
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they the local serial killer?
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User reviews

LibraryThing member bermudaonion
What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell is a collection of essays written by the author and originally published in The New Yorker magazine. Topics range from ketchup to Ron Popeil to failure to Cesar Millan, the Dog Whisperer (and the inspiration for the title).

I listened to the audio version of this
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book, and as you would expect, I found some essays to be better than others. The book is read by the author and at first, I didn't think I would like his narration, but I grew to enjoy it, even though his pronunciation of a few words sounded funny to my Southern ears.

I imagine my mother's glad I finished What the Dog Saw because I told her more than she probably wanted to know about a few of the essays. I found "What the Inventor of Birth Control Pills Didn't Know About Women's Health" and "Mammography, Air Power, and and the Limits of Looking" particularly fascinating. I thought the articles were well-researched and thought provoking. When Gladwell made a point, he often used more than one source to back it up. "How Nasim Taleb Turned the Inevitability of Disaster into an Investment Strategy" was over my head and I felt like I might have understood it better if I'd been able to read it, rather than listen to it.

The audio book is on 10 CDs and takes about 13 hours to listen too. With over 20 essays, it's easy to listen to a complete one in a short time. I enjoyed my first experience with Malcolm Gladwell's work and would like to read more of it now.
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LibraryThing member etorrey
A question that often comes to my mind is, “Why do people do what they do?” Malcolm Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw surrounds this question offering answer upon answer. In my opinion however, this book was not a strong like or a strong dislike, it lingered in the grey area for me. The reason for
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this was because there were parts I loved and related to and completely under stood, and on the other hand there were parts that I hated and couldn’t understand, even after researching to understand, and parts that just grossed me out to the point where I couldn’t finish the chapter.
I specifically remember three chapters the most, the first being why there is only one type of ketchup but hundreds of mustard. This brings in the question “Why do people do what they do?” By asking, “Why do people only care for one type of ketchup?” When in fact there have been hundreds of types made but all have failed when competing against Heinz 57. Yet all people have precise different specifications for their favorite mustard. I encourage you to delight yourself in this chapter because it extremely interesting. It was by far my favorite chapter because it was easy to relate to and a fun topic.
The second chapter I remember is not so vivid this is the chapter I had to do extra research on because I did not understand at all what Gladwell was talking about when I was reading it. This chapter was about the Enron Crisis and the stock market. I must admit my maturity level as a sixteen year-old girl tells me not to be too interested in the stock market or its history so of course I had difficulties with the chapter. The predicament I had with this was I did not understand the terminology, and frankly I didn’t care, so that is why I had such a hard time with that particular chapter and my liking for the book went down. After reading the chapter though I have more of an interest in the stock market but still not enough knowledge to understand it.
The Third chapter that I remember being important to my opinion on the book was a chapter about how you can characterize murderers. Sounds dashing doesn’t it? In actuality it was dreadful. I had made it threw two pages but then had to skip the rest of the chapter. It was just too graphic for my liking Gladwell explained in full a murder of a women and what the killer did, not forgetting one step. That chapter alone took the book down quite a few notches.
As far as characters and plots and themes go, there weren’t many. The narrator of course was Gladwell and that was for the most part the only character. Since the book was more like a bundle of research papers put together there was no plot. And finally the theme in my opinion was an outsider, much like a dog, looking in at many different scenarios and asking “Why do people do what they do?” Then working through the stories to find an answer to the ultimate question of the book.
Apart from what I liked and what I didn’t like I enjoyed most of the book. It was a decently long book so it took some time to read. Unlike most books that I attempt to read that are that long I didn’t feel like What the dog Saw was a waste of my time. The reason for that being because I feel like after reading the book I now understand the world and the people in it just a bit more than I did before I had read the book. That is why I chose What the Dog Saw to begin with, because Malcolm Gladwell’s writing always leaves you feeling a little more accomplished. I have now successfully read all of his published books and can’t wait for his next.
So “Why do people do what they do?” In Gladwell’s opinion sometimes it’s a mental condition, the way someone is brought up, where someone lives, or just because Heinz 57 is the perfect balance of everything good and there is no better way to create ketchup. Sometimes those things are large factors in what we do but in my opinion I believe what we do depends on the situations we are being and have been faced with, and how each one of us are able to cope with the pressure or lack thereof. What we do as humans is mostly a reflection of who we are as individuals, with a little of what Gladwell suggest , but usually with little to no explanation. That is what I enjoy most about Malcolm Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw, as well as his other writings, he tells you his opinion but doesn’t enforce you to believe what he believes, though he is very persuasive, and in the end you still have the right to believe whatever you want to believe.
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LibraryThing member Jenners26
Brief Description: This book is a collection of essays on a wide variety of topics (ranging from Ron Popeil to the Challenger explosion to pit bulls) by New Yorker staff writer Malcolm Gladwell.

My Thoughts: This was my first extended experience with Malcolm Gladwell, whose longer form books I keep
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seeing everywhere (Blink, Outliers). His very ubiquity (is that even a word? It seems like it is.) made him an author that I thought I should try. Because I’m also a big fan of essays, I thought this book would be the perfect fit for me. Although the book was an easy and involving read, I found myself drawing a blank when trying to remember what the essays were about when I started this review. Even with my poor memory, I thought this was odd. Upon reviewing the table of contents, my memory was jogged, but I found that nothing really stuck with me. The things Gladwell writes about are diverse and interesting but, in the long-term, didn’t make too big an impact on me. If you are a fan of essays, this book would be an enjoyable read … even if it doesn’t end up making a long-term impression.
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LibraryThing member browner56
Why do we have several types of mustard but only one type of ketchup? What is the difference between a ‘mystery’ and a ‘puzzle’ and how does that impact the way we think about information processing? Can great teachers be identified in advance? How did advertising for hair color products
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reflect and impact the women’s movement of the last fifty years? In hiring new talent at a corporation, is the strategy of getting the smartest people overrated? In athletic performance, what is the difference between choking and panicking? How did the Catholic Church influence the way in which the birth control pill was developed? Does the profiling of serial killer or terrorist suspects really help in law enforcement? What do dogs see and think about when they are being trained?

By nature, Malcolm Gladwell is a curious person. In What the Dog Saw, a collection of articles he wrote for The New Yorker magazine over the span of about a decade, he asks and tentatively answers these questions, along with several others of an equally interesting and diverse nature. For those familiar with Gladwell’s longer works (e.g., Outliers, The Tipping Point), the narrative pattern in these essays follows a similar approach: posing an intriguing premise that focuses on a particular “case study” and then addressing that proposition with an amalgamation of research from myriad areas in the social and natural sciences, including psychology, economics, sociology, journalism, statistics, and biology. The difference, of course, is that each topic in this volume is examined in 20-25 pages instead of over the length of an entire book.

Although some of the topics seemed a little dated (e.g., the profile of master pitchman Ron Popeil) and somewhat conflicting (e.g., the various views of what went wrong at Enron), I found this collection of essays to be quite stimulating and I enjoyed reading it very much. I have heard criticisms of Gladwell’s work that he engages in pseudo (or “junk”) science to support his analysis, but I think this assertion is unfair and really misses the point of what the author is trying to accomplish. As someone who has produced primary research in my own field of expertise (i.e., financial economics) for more than three decades, I found that Gladwell’s efforts to summarize this area for a wider audience (e.g., his profile of Nassim Taleb’s “Black Swan” work) to be both appropriate and enlightening. This is a book that will stimulate the reader to think a lot about a number of compelling ideas, even if he or she ends up disagreeing with the author’s conclusions.
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LibraryThing member ranaverde
Some of his essays, like the ones about judging and assessing people on limited information, are really good. Others are okay, and one is outright frustrating.

(It's the one on copyright and plagiarism. The problem is that he works from his own personal experience with plagiarism, and since he
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didn't feel hurt by it, and since he liked the plagiarist's work and felt sorry for her, he thinks that any hardline condemnation of it is wrong. What he misses - as when he talks about musical improvisation as an alternate model - is that in literature and the humanities, plagiarism is not merely a matter of borrowing riffs from another person. Borrowing is perfectly fine; that's what notes and citation pages are far. No, what he seems to have missed is the heart of what makes plagiarism inexcusable: the use of another's words not without permission, but without attribution.)
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LibraryThing member 2wonderY
Gladwell is a creative thinker, and I like the juxtapositions of content that he manages. He has a dance therapist analyze the movements of the dog whisperer, Cesar Millan in the title essay. Another good one is a discussion of what it takes to be a good teacher. Those on the homeless problem and
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mammography were particulay thought provoking. I was listening so intently, I missed my exit - TWICE! These are worth reading again.
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LibraryThing member bongo_x
I haven’t read any of his full length books, but I really enjoyed this collection of essays from The New Yorker.

It’s like having a conversation with someone who thinks creatively and is open minded. It’s not so much that he’s telling you how things are, it’s him saying "let’s look at
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this a different way, what if it’s really X instead of Y". In that way it doesn’t really matter so much weather he’s right or wrong about a point, it’s still an interesting discussion. I probably liked it more because I did agree with him most of the time though.

All of the chapters were at least interesting in some way, some of them I will be thinking about from now on. Unfortunately some of my least favorite chapters were at the beginning. The discussions about hair dye and ketchup were kind of like Andy Rooney segments on 60 minutes, there were things I didn’t know and had never thought about the subjects, but I wasn’t sure at all what his bigger point was. If you read this book and aren’t loving it, keep going.
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LibraryThing member petterw
This is not the long awaited new book by Malcolm Gladwell, but rather a collection of his New Yorker stories written over the last 15 years. Still, this is not (only) a publisher's attempt to make money without new material, because Gladwell, as always writes unputdownable material. His enthusiasm
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for any subject permeates the pages of the book, and few, if any, of these essays, however old, are uninteresting. If you are a Gladwell fan this is compulsary reading, if you haven't read any of his wonderful, thought provoking stuff, don't start here. Any other book authored by him will do.
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LibraryThing member cbl_tn
All of the essays in this collection were previously published in the New Yorker and were selected by the author for inclusion in this work. The essays are grouped into three categories: “Obsessives, Pioneers, and Other Varieties of Minor Genius “, “Theories, Predictions, and Diagnoses “,
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and “Personality, Character, and Intelligence “.

The essays in section one are interesting and entertaining, but if you've already read them in the New Yorker there's probably no need to read them again. The content of section three is applicable to business and management, and should be on the reading list of executives and human resource managers.

The essays in the middle section stand out as paradigm-shifting insights and observations on social problems such as homelessness, information overload, plagiarism and the theft of intellectual property, and the risks inherent in a technological society. Most of these issues have become so politicized that it is difficult to discuss them without finger-pointing and name-calling. Gladwell offers fresh perspectives on these issues in a way that will appeal to many on either end of the political spectrum as well as anywhere in between. If more politicians and bureaucrats were capable of analyzing issues in this manner there might be real progress in reducing such problems. Highly recommended.
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LibraryThing member Jellyn
A collection of pieces Malcolm Gladwell wrote for the New Yorker. If you like Malcolm Gladwell's other books, I think you'll like this okay. Some interesting things to think about and chew on in here. Such as a whole new way to play the stock market, reasons to be mad at the inventor of The Pill,
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and.. wow.. some other things I already can't remember. But I'm sure the ideas are up in my head, waiting to be triggered by something.
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LibraryThing member p_linehan
I took out this book for its essay on the Dog Whisperer. I really enjoyed the other essays, too. Gladwell takes unexpected looks at topics. He shows us the other side of a topic that we never thought of before.
LibraryThing member figre
Malcolm Gladwell is the bestselling author of three books – The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers. The only one of these I have read is the latter which, I will admit, I skimmed through and was not impressed. (Others have indicated I read the weakest of the three, and I should try the others.
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We’ll see.) There was nothing in that book to prepare me for quality within this collection.

What the Dog Saw is a fascinating collection of essays by Gladwell that were previously published in The New Yorker. These essays are insightful, entertaining, educational (not in a painful way), and …well, I have to go back to fascinating. Gladwell has the skill of bringing seemingly disparate ideas together, showing the similarities in such a way that new insight is gained in both, and leading the reader to a broader and better conclusion than just a single exploration would have provided.

The first third of the collection focuses on people. But Gladwell does not write biographies. Rather, he tells the story of people and how they impact the world we know. This includes the story of Ron Popeil and the ability to sell; Shirley Polykoff and the invention of the marketing phrase “Does she or doesn’t she”; John Rock and how he developed the pill; and Cesar Millan and how he became the dog whisperer.

Just as you are getting used to this approach, the second and third portions of the book begin to more explicitly explore ideas. Two essays take on the Enron debacle (the first pointing out that it was not the lack of information that caused us all to miss what occurred, but the overabundance of information; and the second laying additional blame at the feet of one group that is seldom blamed – McKinsey). Two additional essays talk about selecting and sizing-up people toward identifying success. There is an essay on the solution of the homelessness problem that mirrors racial problems in the police force. Another piece delves into the subject of plagiarism. Another makes the case that complicated situations that lead to disaster (think the Challenger and Three Mile Island) do not have a cause – that no one is really “to blame”.

This should provide some idea of the varying ideas and concepts that are explored. And, as previously indicated, Gladwell does this in a manner that makes the reader think, makes the reader explore, and makes the reader want to know more.
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LibraryThing member ashergabbay
Every time I visit the US, I pick up a copy of the New Yorker. I love reading the long, well thought out and superbly written, essays. “What the Dog Saw” is a collection of 19 essays written by Malcom Gladwell and published in the New Yorker over the past decade or so. The essays touch on
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various subjects but they all have that “Gladwell touch”: a seemingly mundane and boring topic is turned into a fascinating narrative with thoughtful insights.

The book is organised into three categories. In the first - “Minor Geniuses - Gladwell explores people who have made a significant impact in their field of expertise. I truly loved the first essay in the book, about Ron Popeil, who single-handedly invented the direct marketing of kitchen appliances, first by selling on street corners and later on late-night TV. The story is fascinating from both a business and a personal perspective. The third essay in the book is about an equally captivating character, Nassim Taleb, who devised an investment strategy based on the “inevitability of disaster”, that is betting that the most unlikely event (like 9/11) will happen. I found other essays in this category less captivating, such as the one about John Rock, the inventor of the birth control pill. I didn’t agree with the conclusions Gladwell drew from Rock’s decisions regarding the Catholic church’s approach to the pill.

Essays in the second category deals with “theories, predictions and diagnoses”. There is an essay about Enron and how how all the information was there for everyone to see. Another, related, story deals with a subject that was at one time close to my heart: the impossible job of military intelligence assessments. In these two stories Gladwell makes a brilliant distinction between puzzle and mystery. A puzzle is a problem which has a definitive answer and finding that answer depends on finding all the relevant pieces of information. A mystery, on the other hand, is a problem with no definitive answer, because it requires judgement and assessment and cannot be solved by gathering more information. Many of the intelligence assessments are mysteries and that is why intelligence organisations have failure built into their very nature.

The last category of essays is about “personality, character and intelligence”. Gladwell makes minced mint out of the “profile builders” of the FBI, those psycho-experts that can tell you who the criminal is (almost) by analysing the crimes he committed. In another essay he asks the question “are smart people overrated?”, and in a third he asks whether it is possible to hire people based on interviews. I found some of the essays in this category to be less engaging and less convincing, as they touched on topics that appeared in Gladwell’s previous book “Outliers”, which I didn’t like.

All in all, this is a delightful collection of long-winded essays but easy-to-read essays. Vintage Gladweel, vintage New Yorker.

PS – This was my first ever audiobook. I never thought I could concentrate on a book by listening to it, but I found out that while driving or jogging, listening to a book is a great way to pass the time. I’m now trying to listen to a novel and see if it works just as well.
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LibraryThing member BrianePagel
I'm only about halfway through the book so far; I got it for Christmas 2009. But I love it and I knew I would -- I'm a big fan of Gladwell's, and he's 90% of the reason I'll eventually subscribe to The New Yorker even though I'm a Middleton-er.

Gladwell's essays tie together seemingly disparate
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subjects like the Iraq War bombing campaign and mammography, or plagiarism and Nirvana's music. In doing so, his anecdotal approach to science and thinking helps open new ways of looking at the world. I read only one essay at a time, treating each one like a mini-book: reading it, then letting it sit in my mind for a while. His writing is conversational but in an educated way, like having a talk with a college professor over lunch.
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LibraryThing member Ti99er
I will admit that I have never read an issue of the New Yorker, but I can now say I have read stories from the New Yorker. [What the Dog Saw] is a collection of stories from Gladwell's articles spanning the last 10 or so years. I enjoyed reading [The Tipping Point] so felt I would like these
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stories as well. Typically I find when an author republishes his/her short works in book form to be a bit of a put-off (just a personal thing, when I become a famous writer I will probably capitalize on my works the same way). In this case I borrowed from a former NBC ad campaign for reruns, If you haven't read it it's new to you. I am glad I did as I enjoyed the book immensely. Gladwell is adept at exploring the human condition and describing it from an engrossing layman's perspective.
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LibraryThing member maunder
I have read all of Gladwell's most popular books: Blink, The Tipping Point, Outliers and this book I found to be slightly disappointing - like a Christmas album from an artist you really liked that seemed somewhat deja vu. There were still many trenchant observations and chapters which were
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extremely interesting however it remains a collection of articles he has written for various publications and for that reason seems in some cases slightly trivial. Still though, I would recommend it especially if you haven't yet read and intend to read other works by Gladwell.
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LibraryThing member triscuit
This collection of articles is less satisfying to me than his other more thematically cohesive collections of observations. But he has a great knack for finding interesting things to ponder and he is a good writer as well. I've already retold the gist of his chapter on the Roman Catholic inventor
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of the pill.
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LibraryThing member debnance
You know Malcolm Gladwell. He’s The Tipping Point author. He looks at events and tries to help us figure out why and when and how-to-do-it-again-better. What the Dog Saw is a collection of Gladwell’s articles. I wanted to hit the save button several times as I read this book. One article I had
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to reread was “Most Likely to Succeed.” It compares finding good teachers to finding a good NFL quarterback. Apparently good teachers are the most important thing in enhancing student performance: “…many reformers have come to the conclusion that nothing matters more than finding people with the potential to be good teachers.” It is also hard. It’s hard to find those good teachers. What does it take? How does one become a good teacher? A few qualities this article examines are regard for student perspective, the teacher’s ability to allow students flexibility in becoming engaged in the lesson; personalizing the material, making the material live for each student; and, most important, feedback, “direct, personal response by a teacher to a specific statement by a student.” Just one of twenty or so little articles Gladwell wrote about issues you thought you knew about, you thought you understood…but that science tells you to reexamine.
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LibraryThing member nbmars
What the Dog Saw is a compendium of nineteen essays by Gladwell that were previously published in The New Yorker. There are three categories of stories: biographies about “minor geniuses,” the hazards of particular theories of interpretation, and the shortcomings of the art of prediction.

Part I
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demonstrates Gladwell’s main strength: his ability as a raconteur to tell a good, entertaining story. He profiles the inventor of the Vego-matic, the ad exec who came up with the Clairol slogans, and a gourmet ketchup entrepreneur, inter alia. These stories are fascinating, and delightful.

One wishes Gladwell would just stay away from science, but he can’t seem to resist. In Part II, his stories involve studies: cancer research, brain research, economic research, etc. Before you know it, he’s slipping back into his tendencies to cherry-pick data, conflate correlation with causation, and use anecdotal observations to confirm his theories.

He continues this trend in Part III, with an overview of how difficult it is to predict success in fields ranging from football to teaching to the identification of serial killers. The essay on serial killers is perhaps the most amusing in a meta sense, because he criticizes so-called “experts” in crime profiling by using many of the same arguments one could use against his own forays into science. He mentions, for example, that profilers choose data selectively to fit theories, use generalizations, squeeze case studies into narrow conceptual boxes, ignore counterfactual examples, cite anecdotes as definitive proof, don’t use representative samples, and overstate their conclusions. Except for this particular essay, I’m afraid one could say the same about him!

I found “The Talent Myth - are smart people over-rated?” to be particularly bizarre. Could the collapse of Enron really be attributed to its’ having hiring too many smart people and giving them the freedom to innovate? Should we therefore expect similar meltdowns at IBM or Google? The essay “Blowup - who can be blamed for a disaster like the Challenger explosion?” is a recapitulation of the arguments of Boston College sociologist Diane Vaughan from her book The Challenger Launch Decision, which Gladwell calls "the first truly definitive analysis of the events leading up to January 28, 1986." Considering that Vaughan's conclusions are contrary to those of Nobel laureate Richard Feynman's rather (but apparently not "truly") definitive analysis of the Challenger disaster in Feynman's book, What Do You Care What Other People Think?, one would think Gladwell would at least mention it, but he does not. (In fact, in his one sentence about Feynman, strictly limited to Feynman's testimony before the investigating committee, Gladwell implies Feynman thought O-Rings were the only problem, which was not the case at all.) In “Most Likely to Succeed - How do we hire when we can't tell who's right for the job?,” Gladwell spends a lot of time expatiating on the story of one football player to establish that there is no correlation between being the best college football quarterback and making it as a pro. Nor, he says, can interviews reveal who will or will not make a great teacher. His conclusion is that we should therefore lower our standards:

"If college performance doesn't tell us anything, why shouldn't we value someone who hasn't had the chance to play [football] as highly as someone who plays as well as anyone in the land?”

And as for teachers:

"Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before.”

...I'll just be checking my pulse, and then I'm off for a job interview! ... or a football game; I haven't quite decided!

Evaluation: The essays that stick to facts and Gladwell’s own experiences are very enjoyable. There is no doubt he writes well and is rarely dull. However, I advise anyone who reads or listens to this book to “cherry-pick” from amongst the essays, and take the scientific allegations with a grain of salt.

Rating: 3.5/5
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LibraryThing member stephaniechase
Gladwell's interesting points-of-view are, if anything, even more astonishing in short form, as in this collection of essays from The New Yorker. It is especially interesting to read about some of the topics in retrospect!
LibraryThing member TooBusyReading
Malcolm Gladwell's essays cover everything from ketchup and Ron Ropeil to the profiling of serial killers, terrorist, and vicious dogs. Each essay gives us the opportunity to look at people, products, corporations, decisions through different eyes and a fresh perspective.

As an animal lover, I was
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most interested in the essay about Cesar Millan and his method of working with dogs (What the Dog Saw) and the essay about pit dog and vicious dog profiling (Troublemakers). Despite the lessons to be learned, I don't care about Enron and its SPEs (special purpose entities) or the best way to choose football draft choices. Even though I am not likely to ever hire or be a teacher, I was very much interested in how to tell the good ones from the bad ones. The parts on profiling were fascinating to me although the description of a murder was especially barbaric, even to a mystery- and true crime- reader like I sometimes am.

So, in the end, this book was hit-and-miss with me. Some parts completely engaged me and some I just rushed through in order to move on. It seems there is something for everyone in this book but also the other side of the coin is there may be an essay or two that each reader will find less valuable or relevant.
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LibraryThing member WinstonDog
Malcom Gladwell used up his best material in 'Tipping Point' and 'The Outliers'. This books has too many sports reference for me to relate or care about. The best chapter was about Ceasar Milan - the rest? Just endless fluff.
LibraryThing member Placebogirl
This collection of essays shows the world ffrom a different perspective--that of the dogs that Cesar Milan works with, or an accdental plagiarist, or the Carholic doctor who invented birth control. While this book doesn't provide an in-depth look at anything, the essays are interesting, thought
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provoking and a great read.
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LibraryThing member mbmackay
A collection of Gladwell's articles previously in the New Yorker. Shameless cashing in on his growing reputation, but not a problem for me as I had not read any of these when first published. He is a truly gifted writer who can tell a complicated story well, even if he does occasionally remove some
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of the dimensions. I hoovered up the contents. Read March 2010.
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LibraryThing member sabs83
A series of essays offering different perspectives on unrelated topics. Lots of interesting characters, stories, and unusual facts (like why there is only one brand of ketchup or how hair dye went hand and hand with feminism).

Pages

448

ISBN

0316076201 / 9780316076203
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