There is a reason why Gladwell is a rock star of nonfiction. This is a dazzling book. Stories are well selected and brilliantly told, ideas are slowly revealed until the reader arrives at a conclusion they didn’t expect. Gladwell is advancing ideas and, sure, they are all open to challenge. Is Levine right about TDT? Are the theories of crime prevention correct? But they are stimulating and convincing — and you won’t regret a minute you spend mastering them.
Depending on the reader, these connections are either entertaining and insightful or wild and tendentious, even misleading. Talking to Strangers, Gladwell’s exploration of deception and misunderstanding in human communication, is sure to find both types of reader ... Gladwell is impressive in his range of historical conundrums ... Gladwell’s exhaustive analysis of the [Sandra] Bland case is unconvincing and troubling ... Similarly, Gladwell dances around the topic of torture in his chapter on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed ... He explicitly sidesteps the ethics of torture to keep his analysis tidy, yet in the end his case study is too tidy to ring true.
Gladwell has never shied away from incendiary material, and his newest book is no exception ... Gladwell has a well-honed method for handling live wires, which involves encasing them in psychological and sociological theory and then proceeding to bend them to his will...every anecdote, every story, gets folded into a Big Idea ... his italicized conclusions are designed to hit us with the force of revelation when it finally dawns on us how everything fits together ... Amping up the drama like this doesn’t have to feel cheap; there’s a fine tradition of storytelling as benign manipulation, and in his articles for The New Yorker, Gladwell often gets the balance right. But not here. In Talking With Strangers, he uses theory like a cudgel on sensitive material ... Gladwell’s insistence on theory can be distorting, rather than clarifying. Theory can provide a handy framework, transforming the messy welter of experience into something more legible, but it can also impose a narrative that’s awkward, warped or even damaging ... this anodyne sentiment is too vague and banal to explain anything, much less carry a book, and Gladwell knows it.
... somewhat rambling ... despite its title, the book is not really about strangers. True, Bland and the patrolman did not know each other, and some of Gladwell’s stories involve collisions between alien cultures. But the deceptions of Madoff, Sandusky and others discussed here were practiced not only on strangers, but also on people they knew. Lies, misunderstandings and escalating confrontations have, after all, been known to occur even within marriages ... It is doubtful whether this notion adds much to our understanding of the cases [Gladwell] discusses ... Throughout the book, Gladwell works to build an air of suspense, zigzagging between cases and portentously promising lush vistas of insight just over the next hill ... There is much use of italics for emphasis, to remind us that what we are reading is interesting and important. It would, of course, be too much to ask for effective tips on how to spot the next Madoff, but a little more substance would have been nice.
Gladwell['s] job is to be puzzled by banalities and then replace them, after a great pseudo-intellectual circumambulation, with banalities. Gladwell affects to find it baffling how we can get people we don’t know so wrong. So he calls it 'the stranger problem', and pretends that it explains everything ... To be sure, this book is not exclusively about standing up for the unlucky men who accidentally do bad things just because the 'stranger problem' is so lamentably intractable. It is also littered with historical and pop-cultural anecdotes ... Gladwell bases his book on a single notion called 'truth-default theory'. We tend to assume that other people are telling the truth, which is the basis of trust and social cooperation, so liars are hard to spot. Not mentioned here is the well-known opposite phenomenon: that, far from defaulting to truth, we believe only the information that fits with our preconceived biases. Both ideas are right, because the world is complicated, but Gladwell’s job is to make it seem simple.
Talking to Strangers is a great title, but it doesn’t describe the book Malcolm Gladwell has written ... contains such a varied assortment of stories and studies that it’s often hard to find the chocolate in the trail mix ... Mr. Gladwell is well known as an enjoyable raconteur but a somewhat lazy researcher, and both of those qualities are on display in this book ... inexcusably lazy thinking ... in this story and many of the others in Talking to Strangers, [Gladwell] leaves out what doesn’t fit.
The thesis of Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Talking To Strangers, is straightforward ... But to get to this useful and progressive conclusion, Gladwell meanders through history, telling stories of spy catchers and lie detectors, of Chamberlain being duped by Hitler, of the Jerry Sandusky sex-abuse scandal at Penn State University, of facial analysis of the actors on Friends. These stories range from scientific to anecdotal, and they are all interesting in their own right ... The great pleasure of this book...is not the clarity of this argument but its more-or-less relevant detours, the entertaining histories that sometimes only vaguely back up the thesis ... factoids and anecdotes are immensely entertaining. Gladwell’s writing is itself entertaining—it is clear and dramatic at the same time.
It bears all the marks that have made Gladwell one of the most successful non-fiction authors of his generation. Superb writing. Masterful structure. Eye-catching facts drawn from elegantly repurposed academic studies ... This time, the result is just as enjoyable to read, yet also oddly unsatisfying ... It appears at a time when trust in political leaders and institutions is under acute strain. Yet it avoids examination of, say, a figure such as President Donald Trump, whose leadership surely says much about our understanding of those we do not know. The book feels incomplete and distant as a result. It is too much to say that the times no longer suit Gladwell. But this would have been a better book if it took a harder look at the troubled age in which it has been published.
... a fascinating, if sometimes meandering journey ... Gladwell is an engaging storyteller ... whittling some situations down to 'failure to communicate' may be too much simplification in some cases ... here, Gladwell's theory is a tough sell. Miller was unconscious, and her assault was much more than simple miscommunication...And reaching back to the Sandra Bland case, can we really disregard racism? Does it really just come down to two strangers who don't know how to communicate with each other? ... [Gladwell] bogged down this reader with a detailed dissection of an episode of the 1990s sitcom Friends to make a point about how we rely on people's facial expressions when it comes to reading their inner feelings and intentions. Whatever one thinks of Rachel, Chandler and the gang, I'm not sure to what extent their actions and reactions on set should be used as a guide to actual human behavior ... And what's the lesson here? How do we change our credulous behavior, or should we? How can we read people and trust strangers to act right by us? ... It may be good advice generally — Gladwell mostly shows us — and it is all too often ignored throughout history. But some situations are just more complicated than that.
Falling headfirst into the balance fallacy by invoking sides is never a good sign, and some readers may feel he should have known better ... Having dismissed everything else as irrelevant, Mr. Gladwell dives headfirst into his thesis and supporting evidence, presenting a mountain of quirky anecdotes and interesting research about our blunders with strangers, and why we make them. It’s what Mr. Gladwell’s fans have come to love and expect from his work, and it’s definitely engaging. But even accomplished writers occasionally bite off more than they can chew: The sheer amount of information Mr. Gladwell includes soon proves impossible to discuss with the focus and attention to detail it deserves ... While it’s fascinating to peek at these incidents through Mr. Gladwell’s psychological lens, readers may wish he had explored fewer examples more thoroughly ... The book’s biggest flaw is...its failure to consider power’s role in conflict.
At a time when the world feels intractably polarized, a book examining the varying ways we misinterpret or fail to communicate with one another could not feel more necessary ... With a mix of reporting, research and a deft narrative hand, Gladwell illuminates these examples with page-turning urgency of a paperback thriller, building a case on the ways these misconceptions lead to disaster. Some of Gladwell’s diversions into pop culture pay off more than others ... in examining the Brock Turner rape case at Stanford, Gladwell’s examination of alcohol abuse among university students drifts uncomfortably close to victim-blaming...But for a book implicitly structured around race and law enforcement, the omission of Turner’s controversial six-month sentence feels puzzling and an example of how Gladwell’s sharp eye can overlook a bigger picture ... for all the ironclad rhetorical evidence outlined in Gladwell’s dramatic build-up, there’s a nagging sense he’s left another, very human phenomenon underexplored. Strangers misunderstand one another by nature on multiple behavioral fronts, including when it comes to race, which receives only a glancing treatment here ... Gladwell has again delivered a compelling, conversation-starting read, but there’s no question more of the hard stuff remains ahead.
As in Gladwell’s previous books...the best-selling author and New Yorker writer puts a distinctive and provocative spin on his topic, bringing it to life by populating the book with riveting, headline-grabbing scandals (Amanda Knox, Jerry Sandusky, and Bernie Madoff are among his extended case studies) and drawing on psychological research and social science to support his claims. The book is consistently intriguing and compelling, if at times a bit scattershot ... [the] either/or conclusion doesn’t feel satisfactory given the damage the author has detailed in previous chapters ... It’s surprising, too, that Gladwell doesn’t address fraud and deception on the Internet, today’s primary meeting place for strangers. Does the virtual world require its own set of tools? Gladwell is better at telling us what’s wrong with our current strategies to deal with strangers than at offering up newer, more relevant ones.
With a mix of reporting, research and a deft narrative hand, Gladwell illuminates...examples with the page-turning urgency of a paperback thriller, building a case on the ways these misconceptions lead to disaster. Some of Gladwell’s diversions into pop culture pay off more than others. Hiring a psychologist to map the facial expressions throughout a scene from Friends is a long way around to introduce the idea that people don’t always look like their feelings ... And in examining the Brock Turner rape case at Stanford, Gladwell’s examination of alcohol abuse among university students drifts uncomfortably close to victim-blaming ... Gladwell’s sharp eye can overlook a bigger picture ... for all the ironclad rhetorical evidence outlined in Gladwell’s dramatic buildup, there’s a nagging sense he’s left another, very human phenomenon underexplored. Strangers misunderstand one another by nature on multiple behavioral fronts, including when it comes to race, which receives only a glancing treatment here. Maybe Gladwell felt the topic has been sufficiently explored elsewhere, or was perhaps too obvious a contributing factor to break down further ... Gladwell has again delivered a compelling, conversation-starting read, but there’s no question more of the hard stuff remains ahead.
... there are all manner of definitional and cultural issues through which Gladwell boldly navigates a rather convenient path. But in doing so he crafts a compelling story, stopping off at prewar appeasement, paedophilia, espionage, the TV show Friends, the Amanda Knox and Bernie Madoff cases, suicide and Sylvia Plath, torture and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, before coming to a somewhat pat conclusion ... seldom less than a fascinating study of gullibility and the social necessity of trusting strangers.
... engages readers from the get-go...then loses them as the book progresses. Full of interesting stories about famous people—strangers to each other—who have been tragically misunderstood or whose failure to understand others has led to personal or global disaster, it’s an interesting, yet unsatisfying read. Although its parts are fine, their sum does not quite add up to what we expect in a book by Gladwell ... At the least, after finishing this book, readers might never look at strangers quite the same way again.
Like his New Yorker articles and previous books, Gladwell’s newest is chock-full of gripping anecdotes from the recent and forgotten past, from Amanda Knox’s overturned murder conviction to the double agents who sunk the CIA’s spying efforts in 1980s Cuba. He uses these riveting stories to offer up bite-size observations about how we engage with strangers. For example, we think of ourselves as complex but of strangers as straightforward. Not so, Gladwell insists ... Gladwell’s case studies are thrilling, but their relevance to everyday encounters is frequently obtuse, and the takeaways from them are often buried or provocative ... Readers may find that Gladwell’s alluringly simple lesson dangerously oversimplifies power dynamics in twenty-first-century America.
...[a] thoughtful treatise ... Gladwell writes in his signature colorful, fluid, and accessible prose, though he occasionally fails to make fully clear the connection between a seemingly tangential topic such as suicide risk and the book’s main questions ... Readers will find this both fascinating and topical.
Every few years, journalist Gladwell...assembles serious scientific research on oddball yet relevant subjects and then writes a bestseller. Readers expecting another everything-you-think-you-know-is-wrong page-turner will not be disappointed, but they will also encounter some unsettling truths ... Another Gladwell tour de force but perhaps his most disturbing.
