Edition |
First edition. |
Description |
xii, 386 pages : illustrations, maps ; 22 cm |
Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages [349]-379) and index. |
Contents |
Introduction: "Step out of the car!" -- Part one: Spies and diplomats: two puzzles. Fidel Castro's revenge ; Getting to know der Führer -- Part two: Default to truth. The queen of Cuba ; The holy fool ; Case study: The boy in the shower -- Part three: Transparency. The Friends fallacy ; A (short) explanation of the Amanda Knox case ; Case study: The fraternity party -- Part four: Lessons. KSM: what happens when the stranger is a terrorist? -- Part five: Coupling. Sylvia Plath ; Case study: The Kansas City experiments ; Sandra Bland. |
Summary |
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 classically Gladwellian intellectual adventure, a challenging and controversial excursion through history, psychology, and scandals taken straight from the news. He 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. -- Dust jacket. |
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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 confidence. |
Subject |
Psychology, Applied.
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Strangers.
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Threat (Psychology)
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Conduct of life -- Miscellanea.
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Interpersonal relations -- Miscellanea.
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Trust.
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LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Communication.
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Threat (Psychology) (OCoLC)fst01150299
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Conduct of life. (OCoLC)fst00874563
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Interpersonal relations. (OCoLC)fst00977397
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Trust. (OCoLC)fst01158174
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Genre/Form |
Informational works.
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Added Title |
What we should know about the people we don't know |
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What we should know about the people we do not know |
ISBN |
9780316478526 (hardcover) |
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0316478520 (hardcover) |
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