What the Dog Saw meaning?

At the beginning of 2000 Little, Brown published “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell. It was an auspicious time for both the calendar industry and the publishing world. Mr. Gladwell had a deductive style and a teacherly simplicity that would make him one of the new century’s most frequently quoted and widely imitated writers of nonfiction. He went on to write “Blink” and “Outliers,” and all three books went to the top of best-seller lists. What can this tell us about Mr. Gladwell or about the people who read him?

While he wrote these books Mr. Gladwell continued to write feature articles for The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1996. And those articles — some of which have been collected in his new book, “What the Dog Saw” — had a distinctive format. He liked to begin by framing some kind of broad question. Then he liked to change subjects abruptly.

Let’s suddenly talk about Ben Fountain and Jonathan Safran Foer. They are two writers who had no apparent common ground when Mr. Gladwell contrasted their stories in an essay called “Late Bloomers.” Mr. Fountain had taken a long time to become a writer and had made 30 research trips to Haiti in the process. Mr. Foer had made one trip to Ukraine and written his first draft for a brilliant book, “Everything Is Illuminated,” at the age of 19. Then there were Paul Cézanne and Émile Zola. Mr. Gladwell incorporated those two into “Late Bloomers” too.

The essay’s general point was that we know more about early success than about the kind that comes late in life. Its more startling and original idea — and it is vital to Mr. Gladwell’s success that he can reliably produce at least one such lightning bolt per discussion — was that the success of the late bloomer, like Cézanne or Mr. Fountain, is dependent on the help of others, like Zola or Mr. Fountain’s wife, Sharon. The effect of “Late Bloomers” has been quantifiable, which is good, because Mr. Gladwell has a great penchant for quantifiable data.

People who bought Mr. Fountain’s short story collection, “Brief Encounters with Che Guevara” on Amazon.com have also bought “Everything is Illuminated.” Why? They must have made the otherwise inexplicable Fountain-Foer connection on Mr. Gladwell’s recommendation.

Malcolm GladwellCredit...Brooke Williams

This evidence of a Gladwell effect helps to predict something larger: that Mr. Gladwell’s new book will be as successful as his first three. That prediction would seem obvious. For one thing, all four books have similar-looking covers. For another, all are written in the same style. But there is an important difference: “What the Dog Saw” is a collection of previously published articles. Many of them echo one another in structure if not in subject matter, and Mr. Gladwell’s measured, well-edited voice is always the same. It is a voice of civilized equanimity even when it describes a dog’s bark. “Woof,” a pack of dogs says in the new book’s title essay about Cesar Millan and his gift for dog training. “Woof, woof, woof. Woof.”

Are the carefully constructed articles in “What the Dog Saw” too similar? Or, because Mr. Gladwell favors either/or constructions, are they instead reassuringly familiar? A book that repackages well-read articles by a well-known writer might sound unexciting, but that changes if the paradigm is something other than publishing. What if this were a music album? What if the songs were all catchy? What if the reasons for their individual popularity were uncontrovertible? Then the collection would not feel recycled. It would feel sure fire. It would be “Malcolm Gladwell’s Greatest Hits.”

And there you have it: This book full of short conversation pieces is a collection that plays to the author’s strengths. It underscores his way of finding suitably quirky subjects (the history of women’s hair-dye advertisements; the secret of Heinz’s unbeatable ketchup; even the effects of women’s changing career patterns on the number of menstrual periods they experience in their lifetimes) and using each as gateway to some larger meaning. It illustrates how often he sets up one premise (i.e. that crime profiling helps track down serial killers) only to destroy it. For instance, criminal profiling “is not a triumph of forensic analysis,” he concludes, at the end of a piece that began with a startling description of one profiler’s accurate guesses about the terrorist known as the Mad Bomber in the 1940s and 1950s. “It’s a party trick.”

“What the Dog Saw” underscores Mr. Gladwell’s use of startling contrasts, as when he links the Enron case, the Watergate investigation, prostate cancer research and the hunt for Osama Bin Laden in “Open Secrets.” His idea there is to differentiate puzzles, which can come to satisfying conclusions, from mysteries, which cannot. In “Open Secrets” these reference points prove apt. But there are times when his affinity for a world of tidy, well-defined categories can undermine his reasoning.

“The Art of Failure,” a study of the difference between choking up and panicking, defines choking as a loss of what one knows implicitly and panicking as a loss of learned information. A desire to write about the plane crash that killed John F. Kennedy Jr. is what transparently generated this roundabout article, and Mr. Gladwell concludes that Kennedy panicked while flying his plane in bad weather.

But are choking and panicking mutually exclusive? Is it not possible to forget both kinds of knowledge in a moment of mortal fear? “What the Dog Saw” does not invite this kind of close scrutiny. What it does invite is marveling at the scientific method that led Mr. Gladwell deliberately to replicate the Kennedy flight and be in a plane (expertly piloted by William Langewiesche) dropping at a rate of 3,000 feet per minute. This book’s voice always sounds level-headed, whether it is describing ketchup being tasted or pit bulls attacking a boy. It tames visceral events by approaching them scientifically. Neither author nor reader ever has to break a sweat.