Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know
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--now with a new afterword by the author. A Best Book of the Year: The Financial Times, Bloomberg, Chicago Tribune, and Detroit Free Press 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 challenging and controversial excursion through history, psychology, and scandals taken straight from the news. In it, Malcolm Gladwell revisits the deceptions of Bernie Madoff, the suicide of Sylvia Plath, 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 the resulting conflict and misunderstanding have a profound effect on our lives and our world. Now, with Talking to Strangers, Malcolm Gladwell brings us a gripping guidebook for troubled times.
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Community Reviews
While Gladwell makes some interesting points and connections which deserve attention and action particularly in policing, I think he has too much sympathy for the devil in general. There is no mention for example of how police feel they deserve complete respect or to what extent they feel comfortable abusing their (basically unlimited power). Furthermore, there is no discussion about how racism, both conscious and subconscious, causes white people to expect complete respect from black people, even when they have no cause to expect or merit such perfect and high respect. And the deadly consequences of both such mindsets especially in combination. Trying to explain the Sandra Bland tragedy without more than an allusion to those issues is completely unbalanced.
It’s probably a 3.5 really. I listened to it as an audiobook and I enjoyed it but I didn’t retain a whole lot of info about it. All in all - key take away - Strangers are hard to decipher.
And we have a whole lot of pre coding in us which makes it more difficult to truly understand someone else and what their intentions are. We default to truth, we assume that people’s facial expressions reveal what they mean (we in fact don’t operate like a Friends episode) and we couple situations — the example of suicide being coupled to context. Some interesting ideas and research.
And we have a whole lot of pre coding in us which makes it more difficult to truly understand someone else and what their intentions are. We default to truth, we assume that people’s facial expressions reveal what they mean (we in fact don’t operate like a Friends episode) and we couple situations — the example of suicide being coupled to context. Some interesting ideas and research.
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