What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell

 Gladwell is famous for his books The Tipping Point, Outliers, and Talking with Strangers.  This book is a collection of articles he wrote over a long career for The New Yorker,  He divides the 19 essays into three groups: Obsessives, Pioneers, and Other Varieties of Minor Genius; Theories, Predictions, and Diagnoses; and Personality, Character, and Intelligence.  In the first he recognizes lesser known people who were really good at what they did and impacted the world. The second talks about intelligence failure, and focuses a lot on the fall of Enron. The third deals with how hard it is to use objective measures to predict how successful someone will be. 

Gladwell has a very entertaining and glib style.  You find yourself wanting to believe him just because of his smooth rhetoric.  After listening through 19 of his essays, I recognized a recurrent pattern in his writing. He sets up a case study that seems to clearly suggest something.  Then he carefully analyses it to show that you can't make the assumptions you did when you first heard the story.  His articles are thought provoking and interesting, and I found myself sharing some of his stories with people I interacted with all week. It is an older book, and some of the articles are older still.  Someone under fifty might have to do a little research to understand the Enron scandal and other cultural references to the 70's and 80's.  As someone over 60, some of the articles brought back memories of things I hadn't thought about in a long time, like the old Veg-o-matic commercials and the Loreal and Clairol hair color commercials.  The book is read by the author who does a great job.  I would certainly recommend this book to someone who enjoyed his other books. (2010, 448 p)