Best Copy: The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs

The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs was published in 2012, a year before the similarly-named feline collection also from Random House. The Brattle Book Shop in Massachusetts has a copy of both "big" books, each signed by several contributors. The cartoonists who signed the Dogs book are Lee Lorenz, Bob Mankoff, Roz Chast, Victoria Roberts and Jules Feiffer. A number of writers also signed alongside their contributions: Roddy Doyle, Ian Frazier, Malcolm Gladwell (who also penned the foreword), Adam Gopnik, Jonathan Lethem, and poet Charles Simic. There must have been a launch party or some in-house celebration for so many signatures to be readily obtained, one would think. The price: $200.

Spot drawing
Otto Soglow

Image added September 2, 2023

The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs
Biblio listing accessed August 5, 2023

https://www.biblio.com/book/big-new-yorker-book-dogs-gladwell/d/1507328807?placement=search_results_list

Note:  "Best Copy" is a new designation for the blog, but I think this multiply-signed copy of The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs fits the bill. As with yesterday's post about The Big New Yorker Book of Cats, this is subjectively the best copy of the Dogs book I've seen, but I acknowledge that others may have seen even better. I hope readers with access to such copies, if materially different from this one, will pass along some images.

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Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

 Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005)

Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell's Blink is about the snap judgments we make within the first two seconds of an encounter and how they affect our lives.

Rapid cognition is something we all experience, yet for most of us it isn't something we think about much. Gladwell has thought about it deeply, and the result is a book which presents a lot of new and very interesting information on a wide variety of subjects.

Although this book is grounded in the methods of psychology, it reminded me most of Freakonomics in how it uses its available tools to produce sweeping insights about our world. The topics covered include how some art experts can recognize a grandiose forgery, methods for predicting the future success of a marriage, and how one man beat the U.S. at its own elaborate war game. Each section of the book is fascinating in its own way.
 

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Book Review: Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

Outliers: The Story of Success (2008)

Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell is a national treasure! All right, he's Canadian, but I'll claim him anyway. He does write for the New Yorker, after all. This is the third book of his I've read, easily the best, although all are really quite good.

Gladwell tells the story of successful individuals in a way you probably haven't heard before. He uses research from psychology and, it would appear, demographics, to explode some of the myths we have about success, and to show what, besides obvious raw talent, really underlies the phenomenal achievement of a Bill Gates or a Steve Jobs.

This is not by any stretch a self-help book on success, but it will give anyone insights on the phenomenon of success in our society. I give this book my highest recommendation.

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