Another book I recently finished is What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell.  I have already commented on the cover and how I couldn’t understand why it promoted him as “author of Blink and Outliers” but didn’t mention The Tipping Point, which I think is a much more significant book, so I figured that I should at least say something about the contents now that I have read them.The main, and most obvious difference between this and Gladwell’s previous books is that this is a collection of articles originally published in the New Yorker magazine and not a book with a single theme or premise.  I can’t speak for Outliers since I have not read it, but the other two have a central theory or concept that is examined from various angles, using examples to support or expand on the central theme.

If you didn’t agree with the main point it would make it a hard read, but with What the Dog Saw there are 19 different themes so even if a couple don’t float your boat it leaves plenty of reading.  Such is the subjective nature of reading that everyone will like some chapters better than others, and we will probably have different favourites,

I’m not going to wear my typing finger out by going into detail on all 19 chapters, but will just highlight a few to show the range of subject matter.

Some of the topics that looked the least interesting on the contents page turned out to be the ones I enjoyed the most. For example, a chapter on why there are several varieties of mustard but only one tomato ketchup sounded duller than dull but was very illuminating.  I was half expecting something about market forces, or the power of advertising and brand names, but it turned out that there is a very sound and plausible scientific reason for Heinz’s domination in the ketchup market. ((It involves umamu. I just wanted an excuse to use that word))

I found the third chapter particularly interesting because it is all about Nicholas Nassim Taleb.  I read his two best-known books last year, but obviously they were all written from Nassim Taleb’s own point of view.  Here I was getting some of the same theoretical content but wrapped up in what somebody else thought of him.  The New Yorker article was written before the Black Swan book was published, but actually covers the main concept pretty well.  You could almost just read this article and save the trouble of reading The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness.  I think I already commented on how those books were about 30% explanation on the theory and 70% score-settling.

A chapter about the inventor of the birth control pill contained some remarkable material.  If I was a woman I would find it very scary indeed.

A chapter on solutions to homelessness was especially relevent to me, given my involement in affordable housing campaigns, and extremely provocative.  It demonstrated how chronic homelessness could be tackled in a way that is cost effective for authorities but would be almost entirely politically unacceptable because the solution looks unfair. Let’s put it this way: the Daily Mail would hate it.

In a couple of chapters in the third section of the book you can see the roots of Blink and Outliers.  I suspect that Gladwell, having wrote the articles, decided they deserved further exploration and expansion and so turned them into books.  I then found myself wondering if any of the other chapters would later turn up as books in their own right.  There are a couple on the nature of intelligence that might merit a book, but then again that has been done already by other people and Gladwell seems to prefer going into new areas than rehashing things everyone else has already covered.

By the way, when I say the nature of intelligence I mean that in the sense of information gathered by the CIA and not in the other sense.

A couple of chapters cover different aspects of Enron.  I am greatly over-simplifying here, but one suggested that the Enron management were not really hiding anything – that everything about their business practices was public but in effect hidden in plain view, the sheer mass of publicly available information and reports just made it too hard for anybody to understand.   The other article seemed to be saying that that Enron’s problem was more an HR one than an accounting problem, stemming from their policy of fast-tracking ‘talent’ and letting them do their own thing.

Another iconoclastic chapter tries to destroy the myth of FBI profilers of serial killers, as seen in Silence of the Lambs.  From the way Gladwell describes it, they are closer to so-called psychics doing cold readings, coming up with profiles that are too vague to really help but can be made to look accurate after the fact.

So, plenty of variety in the book.  I would be amazed if anybody could not find at least one chapter fascinating.  I didn’t agree with all of it, but then a book that challenges your opinions probably does more good than one that just reinforces them.  Ironically, the chapter that gives the book its title is the one found the least interesting.

For a change, this was not one of my Amazon freebies, although I didn’t buy it – this was a Christmas present.  I have now officially caught up with all my Christmas presents – apart from the tiny matter of actually learning to play the ukulele and electric bass…