Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by inkhearted
Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know by Malcolm Gladwell
2.0
Malcom Gladwell addresses the human tendency to misread and how this impacts us.
I usually enjoy anything by Gladwell but I had trouble with this one. It raises more questions than it answers. The most troubling thing for me, (and I suspect potentially really triggering to others) was the treatment of the Sandra Bland example and the discussion of the Kansas City police training. The incident is one that has really stuck with me, despite Gladwell's assumption that we may need our collective memory jogged. I haven't forgotten. To read even pieces of the transcript between her and the arresting officer was enraging. To see this line later: "The death of Sandra Bland is what happens when a society does not know how to talk to strangers'---was almost equally enraging. It comes across as flip, reductionist. Racism is addressed in a mere footnote. Gladwell attempts to go further with this in the afterword but it feels like a response to something... as if an editor told him that he had to do more to acknowledge the disproportionate amount of police brutality issues, so he drops a few examples but then in the next breath basically defends the officers in one of the prominent cases. It does not sit well with me and I can't imagine how a Black reader would feel.
All in all it feels like a hasty coverage of a complicated subject and does not age well.
I usually enjoy anything by Gladwell but I had trouble with this one. It raises more questions than it answers. The most troubling thing for me, (and I suspect potentially really triggering to others) was the treatment of the Sandra Bland example and the discussion of the Kansas City police training. The incident is one that has really stuck with me, despite Gladwell's assumption that we may need our collective memory jogged. I haven't forgotten. To read even pieces of the transcript between her and the arresting officer was enraging. To see this line later: "The death of Sandra Bland is what happens when a society does not know how to talk to strangers'---was almost equally enraging. It comes across as flip, reductionist. Racism is addressed in a mere footnote. Gladwell attempts to go further with this in the afterword but it feels like a response to something... as if an editor told him that he had to do more to acknowledge the disproportionate amount of police brutality issues, so he drops a few examples but then in the next breath basically defends the officers in one of the prominent cases. It does not sit well with me and I can't imagine how a Black reader would feel.
All in all it feels like a hasty coverage of a complicated subject and does not age well.