If like me you are a huge Malcolm Gladwell fan, then you will enjoy his newest book Talking With Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know.
Gladwell (broadly, and in his brilliant roundabout way) discusses, “How do we make sense of the unfamiliar? Why are we so bad at judging someone, reading a face, or detecting a lie? Why do we so often fail to ‘get’ other people?” Talking to Strangers is all about what happens when we encounter people we don’t know, why it often goes awry, and what it says about us. In order to explore this topic Gladwell discusses examples such as the Sandra Bland case, the reasons behind Sylvia Plath’s suicide, and the Penn State Jerry Sandusky debacle.
If you are also a fan of Gladwell’s podcasts or just his voice in general, I would HIGHLY recommend listening to the audiobook. When possible his interviews (and they are aplenty) are recorded and given in the voice of the person he is speaking with and there even is a little bit of a musical soundtrack that I think listeners would enjoy.
This book gets a TEN OUT OF TEN for me. Fascinating stuff – go have a listen!
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