What the Dog Saw is an accumulation of different articles that Gladwell has written for the magazine The New Yorker, split in to three categories: Obsessives, Pioneers, and Other Varieties of Minor Genius, Theories, Predictions, and Diagnoses, and finally Personality, Character, and Intelligence. Most of the articles are written pre-2005 which dates some of them, though this doesn't negatively impact the book. Gladwell is a creative thinker and I started this book with high expectations having really enjoyed his other works. Though you'd think that reading small articles would make the book easier to read, I actually found it harder because every 15 pages or so I'd have to start fresh with a new story.

Of the three sections, I enjoyed Theories, Predictions, and Diagnoses the best because it had the most food for thought. For example, why should the Enron guys be put in jail when they clearly made everything public and didn't hide what they were doing with the company vs. Nixon who hid everything. Both lied, cheated, and stole so what differentiates them? I liked the Obsessives, Pioneers, and other Varieties of Minor Genius the least. There was one article I couldn't even get through.

While I did enjoy this book, I would recommend Gladwell's others over this.

The non fiction book "What the Dog Saw" by Malcolm Gladwell is a fun book to read.

The book contains 19 essays that Malcolm wrote in the New Yorker spanning over 8 years I think which makes it an easy read for people with a short attention span or people who don't have hte time to read, you read an essay, put the book aside until you are ready to read another essay.

The book is split into three parts titled:

- Minor Geniuses:
This part talks about people who are not revered in the media for their achievements but non the less are amazing at what they do. One of the examples of these people is Ron Popiel, a household name here in North America, for those who don't know the name does the phrase " Set it and forget it" ring a bell?

Another essay that I found VERY interesting talks about the birth of the birth control pill, honestly this essay was sooooo interesting that getting your hands on the book just to read that is worth it.

- Theories, Predictions, and Diagnoses:
This part is so fascinating. One of the essays talked about the fall of Enron, I think people will still talk about Enron 100 years from now, and what caused them to fail.

Another essay talked about true geniuses with an IQ higher than 150. their was a study done on these geniuses to track them through life expecting them to be the cream of the crop once they are older just to be shocked at the end that no, being a genius does not mean you will be successful. Pretty cool!

Another essay in this part I liked is the one discussing the failure of the challenger mission. It basically concludes that it's not one big huge problem that causes things to fail it's actually a chain of very ordinary small problems that create a huge failure, very interesting!

- Personality, Character, and Intelligence:
One of the essays talks about late bloomers, mostly artists and writers, and how some write/paint brilliant work and then fizz out as opposed to those who reach their 40s painting and writing full-time all through their lives with no tangible success and then BOOM become an overnight household name.

This book opened my mind a bit and I felt I learned something from it and applied it to my day-to-day life.

Malcolm Gladwell has written several books: "The Tipping Point", "Blink", and "Outliers", all of which I have read. This one "What the Dog Saw" is a collection of essays he has written over the past ten years.

Some of the essays were attention-grabbing and some were not; the book contains a wide range of topics and depending on the person reading the book, some will be intriguing and some will seem tedious.

The essays cover such topics as the discovery of the birth control by a dedicated Catholic who thought his discovery was in synch with his church's teachings, but as it turns out that Catholic Church thought the opposite. There is an essay that explains about designer mustards and why they were successful, but why designer ketchups cannot capture the market from Heinz. Other topics include the influence of hair dye in women's lives, plagiarism, Enron's problems, and all sorts of other stories.

This book is a simple read and it does keep one's attention, but I found it lacking in cohesion. The topics while educational just do not seem to pull together to make a whole. I finished the book and felt like the book was just a collection of random essays. They do have some consistency, but I get the general feeling of disjointedness. I favour his other three books.

Good choices for this collection, the style is alert, very well written. Even though some subjects could be boring, Gladwell makes them interesting. I never thought I'd be interested to read about kitchen gadgets sold on TV or ketchup!

I enjoyed all his books, from the first time I put my hands on Blink in one of the Indigo stores.

Always like Gladwell's writing and this was a great collection of Gladwell's essays from the New Yorker.

What The Dog Saw

This is a book of the authors previously published columns from the New Yorker magazine for those people (like me) that don't read that magazine. Each column reads read like a short story with a range of fascinating topics. I found myself reading about Enron, the homeless, training dogs and hair colour among other topics when normally I would never read about these things. For me the first and last third of the book were most interesting (i am not a political person so some of the topics in the middle were not much to my interest).

I thought that this might be like a lot of the pop-culture books out there. As such I didn't put too much emphasis on the accuracy of the content as much as I picked this book up to be entertained. But Malcolm Gladwell seems to manage this genre so much better than others who do the same type of writing (see Freakanomics as one example). I think as one of the quotes on the back of this book says, he is a genius storyteller but additionally I believe he really cares about what he writes about. You can feel the enthusiasm in his words as he crafts each story.

He is not a literary snob. His style is so characteristically simple and accessible that I never felt like he is speaking down to a reader; you can feel he actually admires those people he writes about who are good at what they do, no matter what it is they do.
I was entertained.