What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures

Why does ketchup come in one variety while mustard fills entire supermarket shelves? What separates choking from panicking under pressure? What does a hair dye revolution reveal about twentieth-century social change? Malcolm Gladwell's collection of New Yorker essays ranges across a decade of his most provocative questions, examining dog whisperers, pasta sauce pioneers, intelligence testing, and the logic of human hiring decisions. Each piece approaches a familiar subject from an angle that makes the obvious suddenly strange.

Gladwell narrates his own essays with the conversational curiosity that has made him one of the most widely read popular writers of his generation. His voice carries the same quality of surprised delight in ideas that characterizes his prose, and the essay format suits audio particularly well, each piece complete in itself. At just under thirteen hours, this is a satisfying collection for both longtime readers and newcomers to his work.