WHAT THE DOG SAW AND OTHER ADVENTURES
By Malcolm Gladwell 410 pages.
Little, Brown & Company. $27.99.
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?
Malcolm Gladwell pic left by Brooke Williams
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.
Read the rest of Maslin's article at NYT.
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