My latest read – What the Dog Saw

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I have been a fan of Malcolm Gladwell’s writing.  Joining The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking and Outliers: The Story of Success comes his latest work What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures which is a collection of his writings with the New Yorker.  I have enjoyed all of his books and this new release is no exception.

And to prove life again is all about timing the NYTimes has it’s book review hitting tomorrow’s Sunday paper.  The book’s title is from his writing about Cesar Millan, the noted animal trainer with the hit cable show The Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan.

Gladwell breaks the book into three parts: Minor Geniuses, Theories – or ways of organizing experience and Predictions we make about people.  From these points Gladwell shares those articles that have stuck with him long after the New Yorker articles were published.

I was pretty amused in reading What the Dog Saw right after finishing SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

To say the data and stories by Gladwell and Dubner & Levitt may overlap, it was nevertheless a lesson in looking beyond the regular story to take the opportunity to learn hidden lessons.

Stories about Horseradish and Ron Popeil to the work of Nassim Nicholas Taleb Galdwell is able to interject interesting background stories to hilight datasets and odd facts.  Comparing Enron to Watergate was of particular interest.  But the most noted segment in my opinion is about how people choke.

Gladwell wrote about the Wimbeldon 1993 women’s final between Jana Novotna and Steffi Graf.  With Novotna up 5-1 in the 3rd set Galdwell describes the background to Novotna’s much heralded choke.  But he goes farther in describing how athletes over time have lost concentration and not only choke, but rather panic.  His assessment is that Novotna panicked in the last set by realizing how she was about to capture the most important title in tennis.  He also shares how pro baseball player Chuck Knoblauch had suffered from this “syndrome” or type of panic.

Some have written that Gladwell’s data may not be accurate in his story.  He had an interesting public disagreement with Wired’s Chris Anderson and his book Free: The Future of a Radical Price, but overall I hope to continue reading his work for years to come.

Tags: Malcolm Gladwell, What the Dog Saw, Odd facts, Economics, datasets, , trends