58. What the Dog Saw, And Other Adventures - Malcolm Gladwell

From my post after reading Outliers ... "I'll be first in line whenever [Gladwell's] next book comes out." So how thrilled was I when I walked into Borders for my Sunday afternoon reading ... and I saw a brand new Malcolm Gladwell book on display?! (It just came out four days ago, on October 20).

Maybe a little too excited ... because I was a little disappointed.
What the Dog Saw is basically the equivalent of "The Best of [fill in your favorite music artist here]" - it's Gladwell's favorite articles that he's written for the New Yorker since he joined the staff in 1996. They're pretty much mini-versions of his first three books: the world according to Gladwell, written in an engaging, witty, and persuasive way.

The book is divided into three categories. Part 1 is about people Gladwell calls "minor geniuses": "people like Ron Popeil, the pitchman who by himself conceived, created, and sold the Showtime rotisserie oven to millions on TV, breaking every rule of the modern economy."

Part 2 is about theories, or ways of organizing experience. My favorite article in this section is "Something Borrowed: Whether a Charge of Plagiarism Should Ruin Your Life." In this article, Gladwell discusses plagiarism and whether the punishment for it has gone too far. What makes this article most interesting is that he discusses a personal story in which he was not given credit for something he wrote. I thought Gladwell did a good job of summarizing copyright law, and distinguishing plagiarism (a lot of people confuse the two). In part, he says, "... plagiarism is different, and that's what's so strange about it. The ethical rules that govern when it's acceptable for one writer to copy another are even more extreme than the most extreme position of the intellectual-property crowd: when it comes to literature, we have somehow decided that copying is never acceptable." I think this article epitomizes Gladwell's strengths: he presents information about an important topic in a way that's easy to understand, and he makes it engaging by weaving in anecdotes (in this case, from a personal story ... though I have a feeling that more are personal than it may seem, he just may not always let us know that!).

In Part 3, Gladwell examines the predictions we make about people, like how we think we know whether someone is smart, bad, good at their profession, etc. Some articles in this section discuss how educators evaluate young teachers; how the FBI profiles criminals, and how job interviewers form snap judgments of job candidates (all of which are quite reminiscent of the idea behind Blink). One of my favorite articles in this section was "The Art of Failure," about why some people "choke" and others "panic." According to Gladwell, "[c]hoking is about thinking too much. Panic is about thinking too little. Choking is about loss of instinct. Panic is reversion to instinct. They may look the same, but they are worlds apart .... there are clearly cases when how failure happens is central to understanding why failure happens."

It was great to read these articles since I love Gladwell's writing and I'm unfortunately not a regular New Yorker reader. But one thing that a lot of his critics say is that he never writes about anything new - he just presents it in a different way. In my opinion, that's genius enough ... especially given the millions of books that he's sold. But I think Gladwell got a lot of the ideas from his first three books from these articles that he's written over the past decade: so for me, having read all of his books, I'd have to agree with his critics ... not so much because the ideas aren't new within the whole realm of ideas in the world, but because they're not new within the realm of Gladwell's world.

So here's my theory: he wanted to rake in a little extra Christmas shopping money and decided to bundle some articles together and sell them. Hey - not a bad idea. But it'll be interesting to see how well this book does - especially since you can download all of his articles for free on his website.