Editor’s Choice from 'The Buffalo News'

Jeff Simon writing for 'The Buffalo News' has Malcolm’s new book “What the Dog Saw” listed as an Editor’s Choice where he writes: “Curiosity about the interior life of other people’s day-to-day work is one of the most fundamental of human impulses, and that same impulse is what led to the writing you now hold in your hands.” So writes Malcolm Gladwell in the introduction to his remarkable new collection. One might even say that civilization itself depends on it—which is why such curiosity about the interior life of others is the hallmark of culture and the cultivated and a chilling absence among those whose lives are either too taxing or too vacant to permit it.

It’s also why Malcolm Gladwell, as a literary phenomenon in America, is utterly inseparable from the New Yorker. We have no other regular periodical in America that would lead to the pieces collected in this book, with its first section about “what I like to call minor geniuses— not Einstein and Winston Churchill and Nelson Mandela and the other towering architects of the world in which we live, but people like Ron Popiel, who sold the Chop-O-Matic, and Shirley Polykoff, who famously asked, ‘Does she or doesn’t she? Only her hairdresser knows for sure.’ ”

Read more of Jeff’s review by clicking the title link above or going to this blog posting.