Five Second Book Review Malcolm Gladwell What The Dog Saw and Other Adventures

If you’ve read ‘The Tipping Point’, ‘Outliers…’, & ‘Blink amongst others you will have a fairly good idea of Gladwell’s ideas.

Malcolm Gladwell explores and writes about events, people, economics, society, sociology, fame and other subjects spanning the endless stream of contemporary topics. His ideas and commentary are insightful, funny and aimed at attempting to convince the reader how the world is not what is seems and then again turns theories on their head’s and demonstrating how the world is exactly as it seems. Fun!

Gladwell takes on the poster boy subjects, topics and ideas that society (in the guise of the unified but general social entity!) holds strong common and/or stereotypical views on and uses weird and wonderful examples turns your point of view askew.

However, Gladwell’s examples are extremely exacting and written in his timid and simplistic but, nevertheless, very entertaining manner. If you love a quick interesting and topical page turner then I imagine you will find this latest collection of odds, sods and bolts an entertaining and fluid read.

I also recommend that readers check out his other books. The three I most enjoyed are, ‘Blink’, ‘Tipping Point’ and the ‘Outliers’. They are the perfect easy entertaining reads to pass time on those unforgiving long haul intercontinental flights.

‘What the Dog Saw’ is not in my opinion his best (to me at least). It is a collection of his ‘New Yorker Magazine’ articles circa 1998 to 2008 and even though the content has been organised into three major themes the ideas hiccup back and forth between subjects and topics with a sense of resolution. However, it’s still a fun read and worth the time and effort for the insights gained.

Reviewed by 

Gary Daly