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.
"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.
