Talking to Strangers
What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know
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4.2 • 224 Ratings
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- $3.99
Publisher Description
Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Revisionist History and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Outliers, offers a powerful examination of our interactions with strangers—and why they often go wrong.
How did Fidel Castro fool the CIA for a generation? Why did Neville Chamberlain think he could trust Adolf Hitler? Why are campus sexual assaults on the rise? Do television sitcoms teach us something about the way we relate to one another that isn’t true? Talking to Strangers is a classically Gladwellian intellectual adventure, a challenging and controversial excursion through history, psychology, and scandals taken straight from the news. He revisits the deceptions of Bernie Madoff, the trial of Amanda Knox, the suicide of Sylvia Plath, the Jerry Sandusky pedophilia scandal at Penn State University, and the death of Sandra Bland—throwing our understanding of these and other stories into doubt. Something is very wrong, Gladwell argues, with the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don’t know. And because we don’t know how to talk to strangers, we are inviting conflict and misunderstanding in ways that have a profound effect on our lives and our world. In his first book since his #1 bestseller David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell has written a gripping guidebook for troubled times.
A Best Book of the Year: The Financial Times, Bloomberg, Chicago Tribune, and Detroit Free Press
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Malcolm Gladwell has created a thought-provoking exploration of how we respond to unfamiliar people and situations. In his always engaging and accessible way, the New Yorker writer explores how first encounters can have devastating consequences, from the fall of the Aztec empire to Fidel Castro fooling the CIA. This book is a different sort of read than previous Gladwell bestsellers like The Tipping Point and Outliers—he writes more openly about his own thoughts and feelings on the topics he covers, which made us re-examine how we react in unfamiliar circumstances. Talking to Strangers feels like an important reminder to think twice before making snap judgments.
Customer Reviews
Insightful, relevant, easy to read
This book covers there main sociological topics in a good explanatory manner and relates them to many relevnt examples in modern life. It is easy to read, thanks to the author’s style of writing, but can be a little repetitive, especially of simple topics, which can be tedious. Overall, a worthwhile choice for the curious mind and anyone what looks to improve their views on the world.
Not what you expect
Quite boring and dry, there’s much better books for this topic
very boring
unreadable.... not an interesting sentence in the book.