Hello everyone, I hope all is well with you and that you had a Merry Christmas. I’m back today after a wonderful Christmas holiday. We did some forced family fun and drove around town and looked at Christmas lights. It was so festive and heartwarming. It was also great to get out of the house and go somewhere besides the grocery store. 😉
But enough about that. Today I want to share with you what I’ve been reading. I’m always intrigued by Malcolm McDowell and I bought myself a Christmas gift. His latest book, “Talking to Strangers: What we should know about people we don’t know.”
It’s eye-opening and I’m intrigued by it. It’s talking about how we are unable to detect when someone is lying to us. It breaks it down into a science. It’s fascinating and I’ll definitely write a review for you, but I wanted to share what I’ve been reading with all of you before I finished the book, because it’s that good. Now, I’m off to read. Enjoy your holiday!
A Best Book of the Year: The Financial Times, Bloomberg, Chicago Tribune, and Detroit Free Pres
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.
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 each other that isn’t true?
While tackling these questions, Malcolm Gladwell was not solely writing a book for the page. He was also producing for the ear. In the audiobook version of Talking to Strangers, you’ll hear the voices of people he interviewed–scientists, criminologists, military psychologists. Court transcripts are brought to life with re-enactments. You actually hear the contentious arrest of Sandra Bland by the side of the road in Texas. As Gladwell revisits the deceptions of Bernie Madoff, the trial of Amanda Knox, and the suicide of Sylvia Plath, you hear directly from many of the players in these real-life tragedies. There’s even a theme song – Janelle Monae’s “Hell You Talmbout.”
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.