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  • Talking to Strangers

  • What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know
  • By: Malcolm Gladwell
  • Narrated by: Malcolm Gladwell
  • Length: 8 hrs and 42 mins
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars (8,442 ratings)
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Talking to Strangers cover art

Talking to Strangers

By: Malcolm Gladwell
Narrated by: Malcolm Gladwell
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Summary

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

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)

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What listeners say about Talking to Strangers

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  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
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  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

people aren't transparent. (done)

Here's a summary of the book:
Human personal interaction is fraught with (systematic) misunderstandings, misjudgements and deciet - it's not 100% transparent or reliable.

That's the whole f'in book! And a bunch of meandering (sometimes moralising) stories to illustrate that point. If you want stories buy the book, if you want to learn or think about something, don't buy the book. That's it. I shall be returning it.

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68 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Classic Gladwell please do not leave it another 6 years

So what can I say. Within the first few minutes I’m driving along with my jaw on the floor- oh my god! All my commutes have been reduced to minutes whilst Malcom takes me on a journey of enlightenment and discovery. Forget counting down the miles, I arrive home and sit on the drive not wanting to turn this off! I have waited so long for your new book and still you fail to disappoint. Simply brilliant !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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58 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

Utter Bollocks

I was starting to wonder if I was missing something, or was it just a load of vaguely interesting stories along with stating the obvious- people aren’t as they seem. And apparently this makes things really really hard for ignorant men who rape women and cops that arrest black women for near existing. I wasted an audible credit on this crap and I stopped listening immediately after Brock Turner section. Malcolm Gladwell should do something better with his time than overanalyse meaningless drivel and find excuses for people being idiots. Maybe judges should be a better representation of the population rather than just white upper class men and then they might get some bail hearings closer to the mark. I hope I am not the only person feeling disheartened and confused as to how this is even a book....
1 star for performance for the real life audio elements

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43 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Extra Long Revisionist History...

... but not in a bad way. Gladwell borrows heavily from his podcast in both production and story telling; breaking up the chapters into episodes that could stand alone. The thinking behind the piece, as usual, is extremely interesting and the individual stories are brilliantly fleshed out with actual audio which can break up the rare monotony in the narration.

The theme of the book is a worrying look at how we interact with strangers and our human shortcomings. The only issue I have with Gladwell highlighting each of our fallacies is that knowing about them doesn't seem to help navigate around them (see Kahneman on that).

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29 people found this helpful

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    2 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Promising start but failed to deliver

Promising start but failed to deliver on expectation as it was a montage of separate case studies but didnt see how they all merged to make up the story. Just different cases of talking to strangers with no real methods on really improving on this as such.

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26 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars

Meanders into nowhere

It starts off with a very interesting premise and chapter 3 is quite excellent but then i fee it goes off a full tangent and doesn’t ever recover where it was meant to be going. It’s as if he has all this material from the podcast and trying to string it together into a book but it’s so disjointed I lost all interest finishing it

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22 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

absolutely depressing

absolutely depressing and poor narration of a book.
I just waited my credit for this book.

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17 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars

annoying

I usually like gladwell books and theories but this just annoyed me. it was doom mongering and lacked focus. his editor should have been stricter with him on his premise and thoughts on how he would portray them. seems to be more about bias than talking to strangers. it all felt a bit of a stretch. could it be he was desperate to release another book? I dont know but it didnt quite hit the right note for me.

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17 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Thought provoking in content, modern in form

Finally the audio book responds to the podcast format. Gladwell is in typically original form, applying overlooked historical research to contemporary ideas and issues. The book's main treatise, that a we live is a series of systems that are designed to function based on flawed ideas of human behaviour and interaction is well argued. It is the audio book's format, however, that makes this work easy to recommend over so many others. Presented more as an extended radio documentary or podcast, with recordings of interviews and a musical score, rather than adopting the dryer more typical style of audiobooks, the content of the book is offered in a form that allows it to be more engaging than any other audiobook in its category.

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14 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Enraging background music

This book is interesting, if too America- centric for my tastes. MG takes a long time to make a couple of simple points- the argument is heavily padded and I was relieved when I got to the end of it. However the worst aspect of this recording is the tinkly- winky music that can be heard faintly in the background while MG is reading- it drove me up the wall. Please don’t do this on other audiobooks or you’ll lose a large chunk of your audience I’m sure!

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12 people found this helpful