Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know

Malcolm Gladwell

Sep 2019 · Sold by Little, Brown

About this ebook

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 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.

Ratings and reviews

Once again Malcom Gladwell has written am engaging and compelling book, this time about how difficult it is to understand if others are telling the truth, or not. Gladwell looks at why this is so difficult, how most of us simply 'defalt to truth ' (almost always assume others are telling the truth), how sometimes the signals we use to detect deception (or honestly) are not always accurate, and how coupling (the belief that behaviors are linked to very specific circumstances or conditions) can radically affect law enforcement procedures. Heady subjects but easily understood under Gladwell's direction.

Another great and insightfull book by Gladwell. Only this time i wish there would more discussion on solutions to the problems mentioned

An eye-opening book as to how and why we struggle with communication. This was an easy read and I highly recommend it.

About the author

Malcom Gladwell is the author of seven New York Times bestsellers: The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, David and Goliath, Talking to Strangers, and The Bomber Mafia. He is also the cofounder of Pushkin Industries, an audiobook and podcast production company. He was born in England, grew up in rural Ontario, and now lives in New York.