Malcolm Gladwell’s new book leans too much on private interpretations of truth.
It’s understandable if you think Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book Talking to Strangers is a foray into the subtle art of conversation and bridge building in an increasingly fractured society. After all, the subtitle promises to clarify “what we should know about the people we don’t know,” and for readers familiar with Blink! and Outliers, such positive fare would be natural fit for Gladwell. But Talking to Strangers is a surprisingly darker book. Gladwell’s main focus is on underscoring the limits of our ability to make sense of strangers in the first place.
Coming almost six years after his last book David and Goliath, Gladwell can be forgiven for his more pessimistic tone. After all, the western world is a markedly different place where public trust is increasingly vulnerable and the sinister forces of racism and sexism have taken center stage. In fact, Talking to Strangers emerged from Gladwell’s own struggle to make sense of the 2015 arrest of Sandra Bland in Prairie View, Texas, after failing to signal a lane change—an arrest that eventually led to her death. While Gladwell hopes to understand what escalated the encounter between Bland and police, he also views the story paradigmatically, illustrative of the ways we misunderstand strangers in our increasingly polarized, fear-driven society.In classic Gladwellian fashion, Talking to Strangers takes readers on an expansive and winding journey through history, psychology, and media headlines in an attempt to weave the threads of seemingly disparate histories. I say “attempts” because Gladwell often loses the thread, leaving readers tangled in conflicting advice about how to relate to those around them.Gladwell begins ...
from Christianity Today Magazine https://ift.tt/2OhMpVq
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