Book #13: What the Dog Saw

Title: What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures
Author: Malcolm Gladwell

If you really, really like Malcolm Gladwell's articles from The New Yorker, you'd probably love the chapters of What the Dog Saw, because the chapters are Malcolm Gladwell's articles from The New Yorker. Maybe he's a recycling enthusiast, maybe he doesn't think he got paid enough for his work the first time around, maybe his book publishers were putting the screws on him to put out a new book, or maybe he just considers What the Dog Saw a kind of greatest hits album. Regardless, all of the material was previously published in The New Yorker. The book is 400+ pages (considerably longer than a typical Gladwell book), and even though I'm not a regular reader of the magazine anymore (I used to subscribe, but finally decided it wasn't doing much more than decorating my magazine basket), I'd read about 1/3 of the articles included in the book before I actually sat down with the book.

It's funny, because I don't necessarily think of Gladwell as having a genre as a writer, other than possibly "interesting people" but in the articles that ended up in What the Dog Saw, he tended to write a lot about the military and business subjects, particularly Enron (and after living in Houston, I'm awfully tired of hearing about Enron). I liked the book, but I picked it up (and gave it to my mother-in-law for Christmas) thinking it was original material, so I was a little bit disappointed to be getting used goods. I also missed the (often somewhat loose) narrative focus of books like Outliers and Blink. Still, Malcolm Gladwell's used goods are every bit as entertaining as most authors' new goods, so it's worth a read, especially if you're not a frequent reader of The New Yorker.