A review by smprezioso
Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know by Malcolm Gladwell

1.0

Parts of this book are fine but the parts that are bad are so bad that they ruined the whole thing. There are plenty of other reviews that detail the problems with this book so I won't go into all the examples. Overall, though, there are some really terrible and lazy arguments in this book. Saying the parents of Larry Nassar's victims as as complacent as Graham Spanier because they both had suspicions they didn't act on? Are you kidding? The parents' top priority is their children. Raising unsubstantiated suspicions could endanger their children's careers on the US Olympic Team. Again: their top priority is to their children- saying something negative about Nassar without any kind of proof, and having their child suffer retaliation, probably seemed like an untenable risk. Spanier, on the other hand, had a responsibility to ensure things were ok at his university. He was RESPONSIBLE for what was going on at Penn State; he was responsible for his employees. The parents of the gymnastic team had no authority. Another example: the argument that women are partially culpable for what happens to them when they drink because their ability to judge good vs. bad intentions is impaired. Did we not just go through a substantial portion of the book detailing how top CIA agents were fooled by spies? Did we not go through numerous examples of how judges are no better than random chance at evaluating flight risk during bail hearings? This statement is in direct contradiction to the point he makes in the front half of his book. How about instead, then, men who can no longer control themselves when they drink are the ones who should abstain from alcohol? This book was extremely reductionistic in a lot of arguments. It did not consider tons of social factors that play into our every day experiences. By reducing everything to his central theme of "default to truth", "transparency theory", and so on, he's taking a lazy, reductionistic view of the world that honestly I'm quite disappointed in.