What the Dog Saw and other adventures by Malcolm Gladwell, Penguin, RRP $30, ISBN 9780141044804, Available now.

You can always count on Malcolm Gladwell to deliver an entertaining and informative read – the one problem is when you gather the shorter essays in a long form like this it starts to look a little repetitive.

But, honestly, when you’re dealing with journalism/essay-writing as good as this that becomes a small distraction. Gladwell just has a great knack for taking odd subjects (the history of the birth control pill, reading a mammogram, the secrets of informercial hawkers, plagiarism) and making them engaging for everyone.

Because what he’s really about here is not the subjects themselves, per se. He’s not a journalist in the traditional reporter sense, or even in the traditional features writer sense. Gladwell is definitely an essayist and what he’s essaying is what goes on inside brains. Not just human brains, we’ve got dog brains here also, but mostly human brains. (“Braaaains”)

Gladwell is a consummate observer of people and interpreter of their words and their actions. And in many of these essays he shows us how the ways in which we think can link the most seemingly disparate things that we do (e.g. interpreting mammograms and interpreting intelligence photos from foreign countries).

And he knows how to serve up a page-turner. This is great writing, fun to read and damn interesting to think about for several weeks afterwards. In the words of the man himself:

Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. Not the kind you’ll find in this book, anyway. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think.