Bibliograph

Talking to strangers, what we should know about the people we don't know, Malcolm Gladwell

Type

Label

Talking to strangers, what we should know about the people we don't know, Malcolm Gladwell

Language

eng

Bibliography note

Includes bibliographical references (pages 349-379) and index

Illustrations

illustrationsmaps

Index

index present

Literary Form

non fiction

Main title

Talking to strangers

Nature of contents

bibliography

Oclc number

1107437182

Responsibility statement

Malcolm Gladwell

Sub title

what we should know about the people we don't know

Summary

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 confidenceWhy do our interactions with strangers so 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 one another that isn't true? Talking to Strangers is a classic Gladwellians intellectual adventure, 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 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. --, From dust jacket

Target audience

adult

resource.variantTitle

What we should know about the people we don't knowWhat we should know about the people we do not know

Classification

Creator