Little Brown and Company
Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know
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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.
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 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.
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Book Details
ISBN:
9780316478526
EAN:
9780316478526
Binding:
Hardcover
Pages:
400
Authors:
Malcolm Gladwell
Publisher:
Little Brown and Company
Published Date: 2019-10-09
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This book begins with Sandra Bland and proceeds to Jerry Sandusky, Amanda Knox, and many other high-profile cases that garnered worldwide attention on the news. This is an illuminating perspective in psychology. This really hooks you- I can't stop talking about these old cases, and people remember different parts, and it's kind of wild how events took place. I am going to read it again because there is just so much to unpack.
This books seeks to address our ignorance about strangers and important concepts required to ameliorate it.Concepts like default to truth, transparency and context give us some insight into our unconscious bias and how we can now control these when engaging with strangers.Once these limitations are improved by us it limits the damage caused by our ignorance.This was a good read and I encourage others to try it.
I first encountered malcom gladwell when he wrote pieces for the newyorker magazine. In this book he gives examples of communication problems which have resulted in loss of life and other destructive outcomes.
The book could have made its point with fewer pages.
Social science is a vast and ever expanding field that has analyzed and cataloged human behavior of virtually all types and across virtually all cultures for many decades. There are those who work in the trenches, focusing on relatively narrow issues. And there are those who are terrific at aggregating data across studies and drawing important conclusions. Then there are the very few observant writers like Mr. Gladwell, who simply hits pitch after pitch, some seemingly untouchable, far over the wall. His ability to marshal an avalanche of facts and sort through seemingly discrepant trends and data is simply remarkable. Wherever he turns his critical, if understanding eyes, the reader is sure to gain new insights.It has been said that the devil is in the details. It can also be said that angels dwell there too, and if so, the author represents them extremely well.
