A unique look on social science, Malcolm Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw appeals to anyone interested in complexities of the human psyche and condition.

The book is made up of articles collected by Gladwell over his time writing for The New Yorker magazine since 1996.

He managed to describe in detail even the most uninteresting of occurrences so that even ketchup seemed entertaining.

The book is split into three parts: minor geniuses, flawed ways of thinking and how people make predictions of others.

In the first section, Gladwell touts the typically insignificant inventors.

This includes the hair dye advertisers of the 20th century who have influenced the buying of women, the successes of gourmet mustard innventors and the failures of their gourmet ketchup counterparts.

However, the most fascinating of this section includes Ceaser Milan’s “dog whispering” abilities, the story which the book was inspired by.

The second part consists of a forensic dissection of how Enron collapsed and why the Challenger mission had failed.

But the most shocking of this series of stories is Million Dollar Murray, a homeless man racking up one million dollars in medical bills over a lifetime.

The third, in my opinion, most interesting section, examines how people make snap judgements when interviewing employees,

Gladwell points out throughout the book the simplicity of solving many of these small and large scale problems; it’s a matter of specificity.

Although he is unbiased and logical in his writing, many times Gladwell slights the generalizations of many laws and resolutions throughout culture.