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Talking to Strangers

What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know

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Talking to Strangers

Written by: Malcolm Gladwell
Narrated by: Malcolm Gladwell
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

The highly anticipated new book from Malcom Gladwell, host of the chart-topping podcast Revisionist History.

With original archival interviews and musical scoring, this enhanced audiobook edition of Talking to Strangers brings Gladwell’s renowned storytelling to life in his unparalleled narrating style.

The routine traffic stop that ends in tragedy. The spy who spends years undetected at the highest levels of the Pentagon. The false conviction of Amanda Knox. Why do we so often get other people wrong? Why is it so hard to detect a lie, read a face or judge a stranger's motives?

Through a series of encounters and misunderstandings - from history, psychology and infamous legal cases - Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual adventure into the darker side of human nature, where strangers are never simple and misreading them can have disastrous consequences.

No one challenges our shared assumptions like Malcolm Gladwell. Here he uses stories of deceit and fatal errors to cast doubt on our strategies for dealing with the unknown, inviting us to rethink our thinking in these troubled times.

©2019 Malcolm Gladwell (P)2019 Malcolm Gladwell
Popular Culture Psychology

Critic Reviews

"I love this book...reading it will actually change not just how you see strangers, but how you look at yourself, the news - the world. Reading this book changed me." (Oprah Winfrey)

What listeners say about Talking to Strangers

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Fantastic explanation

Book very nicely explains that how we often go wrong in our perception of the people and hence end up making wrong decisions. It covers a number of examples to convince the concept. However book has slight difference from its title. As title indicates that book will explain certain methods or approaches that will help us to know strangers but there is not much of that.


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Talking to Strangers

it's an eye opener. we generally get carried away by our pre-notions. very well narrated.

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huge fan of Malcolm gladwell's narrative

it's nice to become aware of what has been happening in our lifetime all along. was not at all challenging to listen till the end by spending an hour every day.

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beautiful narrated and connected

loved the way the book unfolded, the connections made to show why it is so hard to understand complicated human beings.

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Fabulous, but then that's stating the obvious!

Fabulous book with great insights. I only wished that Gladwell had narrated the whole narrative.

Must listen to anyone who is even the least bit curious about their fellow beings!

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Must for law enforcing& even HR folks can learn!

Narration was top class. Examples mostly from crimes makes it more meaningful for folks in that kind of work

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Absolutely brilliant!

I feel this is Gladwells best book so far. It’s simply a masterpiece. Extremely well narrated too. Loved the way they incorporated audio bytes and music! Made me retrospect regarding my own assumptions regarding strangers!

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Brilliant insightful and narrated beautifully

loved it... amazing narration gripping... I have heard it twice already just adore the insights

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Talking to Strangers - Kitabi Karwan Review

The fact that strangers play a critical role in our lives seems antithetical and counter-intuitive to our rather narcissistic way of thinking. But the truth is that in a world of over 7 billion individuals, our immediate family, friends, communities and acquaintances, are merely but a statistical dot. True to his rather unorthodox choice of subject areas to explore, Gladwell has perhaps written his most critical work. The more I think about it, almost all of of my encounters with “strangers” are subtly influenced by a million factors, including subtitles which are rather ingrained due to the rather unique socio-cultural context of my (or anyone’s) unique upbringing. That’s where the problem arises. This unique context presents a major barrier in effective communication, and leaves much to be desired in terms of efficiency.
Something that hit me like a bolt of lightning was the fact that how far the globe is from a truly globalised world, in a meaningful sense of the term. What makes this more interesting is the increasing tendency of dominant political and cultural communities to simultaneously homogenise within a fixed set of borders, refusing to recognise the frayed edges of each sub-group that gives meaning to the phrase “unity in diversity”, and on the other hand, diversifying themselves globally by “other-isation" of other entities and paradoxically also claiming the benefits of liberalisation, although the last bit has started gaining a rather limited nature recently. In this rather polarising, undirected world, it is important to understand the intricacies of communicating with strangers or for that matter, even known people.
Personally, I feel Gladwell could have spent some more time exploring the theory behind his assertions. He did follow his usual style of empirical assertion followed by building on the extrapolated evidence with research. But it somehow felt as if there was a lot more empiricism and less of…solution oriented theory. I can hardly complain, though as the book has never been marketed as fixer of the problem, but it would have been nice nevertheless to be nudged towards a potential thought, rather than being left at a station with your never-ending train of thought.
PS: Something I loved discovering in this book was the concept of “default truth”. I won’t take away the meaning of the book by attempting to explain it, but it is something which scientifically explains why people tend to believe in people…to an extent.

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Below expectations

A very interesting topic and Malcolm Gladwell's intellect, as demonstrated in his previous works - this influenced me to opt for this audiobook. However, in my opinion, the topic of the book was not explored or given due justice, rather it was just scraped at using cases which carry, in a way, similar themes and are mostly pertaining to USA. Also, The message/learning to be derived from this book, as elaborated by Mr. Gladwell towards the end, is not that appealing / enticing.

Narration / performance wise, this audiobook is good, though.

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