Stranger(s) Than Fiction

A few years back, I sang the praises of Malcolm Gladwell's podcast, Revisionist History. It continues to this day, and I continue to be enthralled with every new episode. But Gladwell, of course, is an author too. And I'd never read one of his books. I decided to address this with his latest effort, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know.

Talking to Strangers is a book about miscommunication, generally organized around this thesis. We all know how complicated our own thoughts are. We know we can have bad days, or be distracted, or have people take us out of context or misunderstand us or ascribe wrong motives to our behavior. We know we are complicated individuals. Yet when we look to others, we routinely imagine ourselves to be excellent judges of character and motive. We're all armchair psychologists. Yet clearly we cannot be as good at it as we imagine ourselves to be.

Predictably -- almost inevitably, given the subject -- this book got Gladwell into a bit of hot water in the Twittersphere when it was first released a few months back. Talking to Strangers devotes different chapters to different anecdotes that effectively poke around at his thesis from all sides. Two in particular awakened the ire of critics: the death of Sandra Bland, and the Brock Turner rape case. In both cases, some people construed Gladwell's contextualization of these two events as forgiveness of wrongdoing. I would say it most emphatically was not -- nor does his examination in this same book of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed endorse terrorism or waterboarding, or his examination of Jerry Sandusky support child molestation. The criticisms, I feel, came largely from people who did not in fact read the whole book and take Gladwell's larger point.

I for one found reading the entire book a breeze. Gladwell has an incredibly natural, conversational writing style. It's possible that I've just become very familiar with his voice after listening to his podcast, but I found myself hearing him read the book in my head as I read along. It's not an especially long book, but it feels shorter still as the prose briskly pulls you along.

That said, I would say that if this reminded me of his podcast, it would be would of the "quite good, but not great" episodes. Each of the anecdotes he recounts is intriguing, but I wasn't entirely convinced that they assembled together in the strongest unified case. It may well be that Malcolm Gladwell's work in a more episodic format has led him to write a more episodic book. It did make me quite curious, though, to go back to one of his earlier, breakout books at some point and see how that hits me.

I'd give Talking to Strangers a B+. If you're already a fan of Malcolm Gladwell's writing, it feels like a no-brainer to me.