“Talking to Strangers is a classic Gladwellian intellectual adventure, a challenging and controversial excursion through history, psychology, and scandals taken straight from the news.” “Something is very wrong, Gladwell argues, with the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don’t know.”
He uses examples for his conclusions from the TV show Friends, the Amanda Knox and Bernie Madoff cases, to support his conclusions. He starts right out in the introduction and takes us step by step through the story of Sandra Bland, the African American woman who in July 2015 was stopped by a traffic cop in a small Texas town. She was on her way to a new job and a police car came up behind her. Doing what almost all of us would have done, she moved aside to let the car pass and that is when the trouble started. In spite of a recording that was made Gladwell’s approach “is an attempt to understand what really happened”
One puzzle looked at early in the book is: “Why can’t we tell when the stranger in front of us is lying to our face?” To understand this point he shows how Castro’s Cuba had a spy network that totally fooled US intelligence.
The final point made in the book said: “Because we do not know how to talk to strangers, what do we do when things go awry with strangers? We blame the stranger.
My own conclusion is that I didn’t think the book went very deep into it subject and it seemed like we were expected to just be glad someone asked the questions? I blame Gladwell for that by the way.
