What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures
By Malcolm Gladwell
Allen Lane £20, 410 pages
FT Bookshop price: £16

A new reader of Malcolm Gladwell, who turned first to the title piece of this collection of articles by the much-garlanded writer, might wonder what the fuss is about.

What the Dog Saw is a 22-page piece on Cesar Millan, a man insomniac viewers of cable TV know as the Dog Whisperer, who tackles problem dogs such as Bandit, a terrorist Chihuahua. After consulting a dance movement psychotherapist about Millan’s technique (“He’s very vertical. His legs are right under his torso”), Gladwell concludes: the problem with problem dogs is not the dogs, but their owners. Gosh.

This is surely not the kind of insight that caused Time magazine to name Gladwell one of the world’s 100 Most Influential People, for example, or has sent his books The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers to the top of the bestseller lists.

There is nothing newly penned in this book. But, happily for his fans, What the Dog Saw is the weakest piece in this collection of Gladwell’s favourite articles from his 13 years as a writer for The New Yorker .

The book covers a sweep of subjects, echoing those he develops in the three books that have established him as a popular philosopher/journalist. Why do some great artists blossom late in life (Cézanne) while some are brilliant from the start (Picasso); why is intelligence so hard to get right before an event such as 9/11?

After reading the 22 pieces here – and then reading Blink and Outliers – I wearied a bit of the formula. He starts with the set-up, involving the tale of what happened to an individual on some significant day in their life. People’s physical appearance and demeanour are always described in detail. Next comes the proposition: what you assumed to be the case in, say, how the Pill works, turns out not to be so. Then follows the research that proves his often counter-intuitive thesis.

But Gladwell’s range is impressive and his writing never less than engaging. There is nothing wearying about his choice of subjects and his ability to shed light on aspects of life that puzzle us, consciously or unconsciously. He is probably the best exponent of the recent trend of books that seek to reveal to us the secrets of our complex world through the prism of some social science, usually in a surprisingly reassuring way – Freakonomics, The Undercover Economist and The Black Swan, for example. What the Dog Saw even includes an article about the investment strategies of Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan’s author.

There are other articles about the world of business and finance, notably two about Enron. One piece considers the paradox of how the energy group’s finances spiralled almost undetected to the point of implosion, even though it published vast amounts of information about its accounts in annual reports and filings to the US Securities and Exchange Commission. In a footnote, Gladwell asks: “Had we taken the lessons of Enron more seriously, would we have had the financial crisis of 2008?” Surely a subject for a new Gladwell book.

Hugh Carnegy is the FT’s executive editor