(ColbertNewsHub has details, should you be interested.)
I'm not a huge fan of Malcolm Gladwell, but the book he's promoting (he wrote the forward) is The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs. Like Booklist (at Amazon), I figured:
The title says it all. It’s from the New Yorker! It’s about dogs!
What could go wrong?
And then I found this thebark.com review:
There is a certain urbane aloofness and detachment about the New Yorker writing style — it appears to be more feline than canine in nature. Perhaps that started with James Thurber, who was heralded for his dog writing. But as Adam Gopnik explains in this new anthology, The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs (Random House), for Thurber, dogs were really stand-ins for men. So when he “wrote about dogs” he was “writing about men,” and especially “men” in opposition to women and wives, whom Thurber didn’t seem to like much.
There is a lot of Thurber in this collection; each of its rather banally organized chapters — Good Dogs, Bad Dogs, Top Dogs and Underdogs — begins with one of his stories.There are also many contributions from droll, observational commentators like Susan Orlean (three entries) and Malcolm Gladwell (four, including the foreword)...
A piece that didn’t deserve another airing is here, too — Malcolm Gladwell’s highly controversial “What the Dog Saw,” a naïf, narrow profile of Cesar Millan. When it first appeared in 2006, many of us were astonished that Gladwell never questioned the theories or methods used by Millan but instead, chose to focus on how the man “moves” around dogs, asking dancers and movement specialists — not animal behaviorists, academics or trainers — for their analysis. Had he asked any of the “dog people,” they would have pointed out that the best dog training today relies on rational, effective and, yes, humane methods, not on anachronistic and ill-informed theories...
Heh.
Oh, and Jon's got Laura Linney, about whom I know only what Google tells me:
Oh, and that RottenTomatoes suggests that her current movie is maybe not amazing. Oh well.
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