Talking to Strangers
What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know
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4.2 • 1.5K Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A Best Book of the Year: The Financial Times, Bloomberg, Chicago Tribune, and Detroit Free Pres
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 each other that isn't true?
While tackling these questions, Malcolm Gladwell was not solely writing a book for the page. He was also producing for the ear. In the audiobook version of Talking to Strangers, you'll hear the voices of people he interviewed--scientists, criminologists, military psychologists. Court transcripts are brought to life with re-enactments. You actually hear the contentious arrest of Sandra Bland by the side of the road in Texas. As Gladwell revisits the deceptions of Bernie Madoff, the trial of Amanda Knox, and the suicide of Sylvia Plath, you hear directly from many of the players in these real-life tragedies. There's even a theme song - Janelle Monae's "Hell You Talmbout."
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.
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 reexamine how we react in unfamiliar circumstances. Talking to Strangers feels like an important reminder to think twice before making snap judgments.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this thoughtful treatise spurred by the 2015 death of African-American academic Sandra Bland in jail after a traffic stop, New Yorker writer Gladwell (The Tipping Point) aims to figure out the strategies people use to assess strangers to "analyze , critique them, figure out where they came from, figure out how to fix them," in other words: to understand how to balance trust and safety. He uses a variety of examples from history and recent headlines to illustrate that people size up the motivations, emotions, and trustworthiness of those they don't know both wrongly and with misplaced confidence. He relates, for example, the story of a whole cadre of American spies in Cuba who were carefully handpicked by American intelligence operatives, all of whom turned out to be pro-Castro double agents. Gladwell writes in his signature colorful, fluid, and accessible prose, though he occasionally fails to make fully clear the connection between a seemingly tangential topic such as suicide risk and the book's main questions. In addition to providing an analysis of human mental habits and interactions, Gladwell pleas for more thoughtful ways of behaving and advocates for people to embrace trust, rather than defaulting to distrust, and not to "blame the stranger." Readers will find this both fascinating and topical.
Customer Reviews
For forward thinkers
Still doesn’t put blame on anyone.?!
MG Jumps Small Rubber Shark Screaming Jaws
A collection of tedious liberal totems re-told unimaginatively.
Just to make a single observation: "M Brown was SUSPECTED of robbing a convenience store"?? No Malcolm, we have a videotape of hi, robbing the store and roughing up the terrified owner. He was a 6' 8", 300# hyper-violent thug who assaulted a police officer in his car and then attacked him again. Even the egregious E Holder's Justice Department could not find anything wrong with the officer's actions.
The rest of the book is packed with shallow bias and nonsense. You have gotten lazy and arrogant. I will never waste another dime on you.
Enlightening as Usual
Gladwell puts together another string of familiar occurrences and then pulls them apart to help us understand why we do what we do. Entertaining, enlightening and informative.