WHAT THE DOG SAW / Review

by Malcolm Gladwell

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 The New 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.

What The Dog Saw is a compilation of Malcolm Gladwells favorite
articles published in The New Yorker, 
where he has been on staff since 1996.


In the preface, Gladwell explains that he has grouped 
the articles into three categories. 
They are:

Part One – Obsessives, Pioneers, and Other Varieties of Minor Genius 
Part Two – Therories, Predictions, and Diagnoses
Part Three – Personality, Character, and Intelligence

Here are a few interesting tidbits of information, 
that I gleaned from each of the groups.
A – Ketchup is a nineteenth-century creation, 
and the original was a more watery concoction than what we use today.
B – Over an 18 month period, 15 “chronically homeless individuals” 
visited the emergency room,
at The University of California, San Diego Medical Center,
417 times.  They ran up bills that averaged $100,000 each.
One of them showed up 87 times!

C – All quarterbacks drafted into the pros are required to 
take an IQ test called The Wonderlic Personnel Test.


From the story of Ron Popeil 
to the crime ranking of New York City 
(on a list of 240 cities with a population of a hundred thousand or more…)
What The Dog Saw, was an enjoyable and informative read.

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My thanks to Miriam and Hachette

for giving me the opportunity to

read and review this book.