For someone who entered college with no intention of becoming a writer, Malcolm Gladwell has found remarkable success as the author of three best-selling, non-fiction books, the only three he’s written, as a matter of fact.
His fourth effort, What the Dog Saw (published by Little Brown & Company, available Oct. 20 for $34.99), is a compilation of some of Gladwell’s work as a staff writer with The New Yorker, a position he’s held since 1996. Readers of his previous works — The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers — will recognize Gladwell’s fluid storytelling, accessible style and keen insights in the 400-plus pages of What the Dog Saw.
Lacking a cohesive theme, the book is split into three sections. Part one - Obsessives, Pioneers, and Other Varieties of Minor Genius - enjoys more story-telling than insight as Gladwell profiles compelling figures from the world of infomercials, advertising, and reality TV, to name a few.
The most riveting read here is the profile of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a Wall Street trader unlike any other. His experience inside the jungle that is the New York Stock Exchange had taught him one irrefutable fact about investing: on a long enough timeline, the markets will always tank. Using that kernel of undeniable truth against the so-called market experts, Gladwell shows how Taleb concocted an exotic stable of investment strategies that have made him and his clients incredibly rich, mostly at the cost of those supposedly “in-the-know”. The story serves as a cautionary tale for those who claim to understand the unknowable and those others that place their faith in them.
The essays in parts two (Theories, Predictions, and Diagnoses) and three (Personality, Character, and Intelligence) could have found a place inside one of Gladwell’s first three books. These sections contain more of the sharp observations and convincing yet unconventional ideas that made Gladwell’s first three tomes so memorable. Enron is a particular favourite of Gladwell as he uses the spectacular rise and fall of the former corporate behemoth to convincingly argue that there is such a thing as having too much information and that smart people are often, well, quite stupid.
Flipping through these pages, the reader feels as though they’re being let in on some secrets along the way. It’s engaging stuff, to be sure, and makes one thankful that Gladwell didn’t have the grades for law school and was turned down by every Toronto ad agency he applied to.
(Dog eyes image by Przykuta, from Wikimedia Commons, used under Creative Commons 3.0 license)
