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Reviews tagging 'Alcoholism'
Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know by Malcolm Gladwell
11 reviews
sabrielsbell's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
4.0
I listened to this on audiobook and really liked the narrators. Some things I enjoyed about this book was the narrative aspects and the dig into current and historical events that dealt with miscommunication. I also liked the way the author slowly added on to the concept he was presenting.
There were a few things that kept me from giving it a five star rating. Mainly, there were several incredibly hard topics that were used to illustrate a point in the book which I did not mind. However, I think the author could have done a better job making sure the reader knew his stance on some of these cases. For example, Brock Turner and his assault is one of the cases. The author uses this story to illustrate the negative roles of alcohol in relation to stranger interactions. I wish the author had also made it clear that Brock Turner was wrong regardless of the alcohol. He does call the assault tragic, horrible etc. and discusses the ruling by the court and why it went the way it did. But, at times it felt that the author was rationalizing Brock's actions instead of using it to make a point. However, after listening to the whole book, I don't think the author was in any way siding with Brock or any of the "bad" people discussed. If the author had been more clear though I think this would be a book I recommended to more people.
There were a few things that kept me from giving it a five star rating. Mainly, there were several incredibly hard topics that were used to illustrate a point in the book which I did not mind. However, I think the author could have done a better job making sure the reader knew his stance on some of these cases. For example, Brock Turner and his assault is one of the cases. The author uses this story to illustrate the negative roles of alcohol in relation to stranger interactions. I wish the author had also made it clear that Brock Turner was wrong regardless of the alcohol. He does call the assault tragic, horrible etc. and discusses the ruling by the court and why it went the way it did. But, at times it felt that the author was rationalizing Brock's actions instead of using it to make a point. However, after listening to the whole book, I don't think the author was in any way siding with Brock or any of the "bad" people discussed. If the author had been more clear though I think this would be a book I recommended to more people.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Adult/minor relationship, Alcoholism, Gun violence, Racism, Self harm, Sexual assault, Suicidal thoughts, Suicide, Torture, Police brutality, Suicide attempt, and Murder
nothankyouuu's review against another edition
dark
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
tense
fast-paced
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child abuse, Rape, and Suicide
Moderate: Alcoholism
easta98's review against another edition
dark
emotional
informative
tense
medium-paced
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Pedophilia, Rape, Sexual assault, and Murder
Moderate: Alcoholism, Miscarriage, and Police brutality
antireading's review against another edition
1.25
I feel as though Gladwell ignores other factors to the discussions he brings up, most especially race, gender, and their intersections. He drills down everything to miscommunication but doesn't bring up the fact that many are predisposed to not wanting to be truthful in communication with women, with Black people, etc. It is not JUST because of policing practices that Black people get pulled over, but it is because of a bias against them and the communities that are over-policed. It felt like he was oversimplifying a lot.
The section on Jerry Sandusky and Brock Turner was gross. He treated CIA operatives who invented torture tactics with more care than victims of rape. He seemed to outright disbelieve the victims of Sandusky and chalk up Turner's rape to a "miscommunication" due to alcohol. He calls most sexual harassment on college campuses miscommunications due to alcohol and hazy rules of consent, while also acknowledging that 1 in 5 female college students report being sexually harassed. He also says the problem is equally with the men raping and the alcohol. Alcohol is a large chunk of the book for no apparent reason as it doesn't tie into the main Sandra Bland storyline like other issues do at the end. I wasn't interested in hearing excuses for a man raping an unconscious woman, but apparently, women should have known better.
The medium of an audiobook was interesting as Gladwell aimed to make it a high-quality podcast. That fell short when I had issues understanding snippets of the audio from various types of recording equipment, age of recordings, accents, and speeds of talking. I found myself just drowning out those snippets, especially when listening in the car, as the jumpiness of quality was too distracting. I feel like the description, while it technically does describe what happened, didn't really feel like the book as I was getting into it. It was very much interconnected stories but I thought those points would be briefly brought up, not dedicating whole chapters to it.
The section on Jerry Sandusky and Brock Turner was gross. He treated CIA operatives who invented torture tactics with more care than victims of rape. He seemed to outright disbelieve the victims of Sandusky and chalk up Turner's rape to a "miscommunication" due to alcohol. He calls most sexual harassment on college campuses miscommunications due to alcohol and hazy rules of consent, while also acknowledging that 1 in 5 female college students report being sexually harassed. He also says the problem is equally with the men raping and the alcohol. Alcohol is a large chunk of the book for no apparent reason as it doesn't tie into the main Sandra Bland storyline like other issues do at the end. I wasn't interested in hearing excuses for a man raping an unconscious woman, but apparently, women should have known better.
The medium of an audiobook was interesting as Gladwell aimed to make it a high-quality podcast. That fell short when I had issues understanding snippets of the audio from various types of recording equipment, age of recordings, accents, and speeds of talking. I found myself just drowning out those snippets, especially when listening in the car, as the jumpiness of quality was too distracting. I feel like the description, while it technically does describe what happened, didn't really feel like the book as I was getting into it. It was very much interconnected stories but I thought those points would be briefly brought up, not dedicating whole chapters to it.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Adult/minor relationship, Alcoholism, Child abuse, Confinement, Death, Genocide, Gun violence, Racism, Rape, Sexual assault, Sexual content, Sexual violence, Suicidal thoughts, Suicide, Torture, Violence, Police brutality, Suicide attempt, Murder, Alcohol, Sexual harassment, War, and Classism
Minor: Child death and Vomit
ferdie's review against another edition
challenging
informative
sad
tense
medium-paced
4.5
The audio book is amazing. Hearing the voices as much as we could felt important to the points Gladwell was making about what we really know from our observations of strangers. In a highly divided world, "Talking to strangers" makes me reevaluate my quick judgement and learn to move through it towards curiosity and nuance.
TThere were parts I greatly disagreed with and times where I waited for Gladwell to bring in perspectives in that he just... didn't. Overall, I appreciated what he added to conversation and definitely learned some new things, but am also walking away from the book feeling like there big pieces missing.
TThere were parts I greatly disagreed with and times where I waited for Gladwell to bring in perspectives in that he just... didn't. Overall, I appreciated what he added to conversation and definitely learned some new things, but am also walking away from the book feeling like there big pieces missing.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Pedophilia, Rape, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, and Police brutality
Moderate: Adult/minor relationship, Suicide, and Alcohol
Minor: Alcoholism, Emotional abuse, and Torture
okiecozyreader's review against another edition
challenging
hopeful
informative
4.5
The audio for this is the way to go. Gladwell has actors and live footage reading scripts, which I would think has to make it more interesting to listen to.
This book starts with a court case of a black woman, Sandra Bland and a cop who interrogated her after a minor traffic infraction, sending her to jail where she committed suicide.
He says, in the introduction:
“There are bad cops. There are biased cops. Conservatives prefer the former interpretation, liberals the latter. In the end the two sides canceled each other out. Police officers still kill people in this country, but those deaths no longer command the news. I suspect that you may have had to pause for a moment to remember who Sandra Bland was. We put aside these controversies after a decent interval and moved on to other things.
I don’t want to move on to other things.” P7
He goes back and forth between this case and several others. Hitler, Cuba, Larry Nasser, Amanda Knox, Chanel Miller, Sylvia Plath, and several case studies to try to understand why it is difficult to understand strangers. He uses ideas like the Friends Fallacy - that we try to gauge people by their facial expressions and we often get things wrong because people don’t often display how they feel. Instead, it takes more careful understanding of people to discern why they are acting the way they act.
—
“
But to start, I have two questions—two puzzles about strangers— “ intro
“Puzzle Number One: Why can’t we tell when the stranger in front of us is lying to our face? “ Ch 1
“…try to answer one of the biggest puzzles in human psychology: why are we so bad at detecting lies?” Ch 3
Ch 2
“The people who were right about Hitler were those who knew the least about him personally . The people who were wrong about Hitler were the ones who had talked with him for hours.”
“Puzzle Number Two: How is it that meeting a stranger can sometimes make us worse at making sense of that person than not meeting them?”
Chapter 3
If I can convince you of one thing in this book: let it be this: Strangers are not easy.
Chapter 4
That’s the consequence of not defaulting to trust. If you don’t begin in a state of trust, you can’t have meaningful social encounters.”
Chapter 5
“But defaulting to truth is not a crime. It is a fundamentally human tendency.”
We think we want our guardians to be alert to every suspicion. We blame them when they default to truth. When we send a person like Graham Spanier to jail, we send a message to all of those in authority about the way we want them to make sense of strangers - without stopping to consider the consequences of sending that message.
Chapter 6
Folk psychology is the kind of crude psychology we gain from cultural sources, such as sitcoms. But that is not the way things happen in real life.
Transparency is a myth - an idea we’ve picked up from too much television and reading too many novels where the hero’s “jaw dropped with astonishment,” or “eyes went wide with surprise.”
The unobservables create noise not signal.
Advantage that the judge has over the computer [by seeing the person] isn’t really an advantage
But the requirement of humanity means that we have to tolerate an enormous amount of error. That is the paradox of talking to strangers. We need to talk to them. But we’re terrible at it…
Ch 8
“…we nearly always miss crucial clues in the moment.”
Chapter 9
“The right way to talk with strangers is with caution and humility.”
Chapter 10
“…poets have far and away the highest suicide rates - as much as five times higher than the general population. Something about writing poetry appears either to attract the wounded or to open new wounds…”
“We do not understand the importance of the context in which the stranger is operating.”
Ch 11
“Coupling teaches us the opposite. Don’t look at the stranger and jump to conclusions. Look at the strangers world.”
“There is something about the idea of coupling - of the notion that a stranger’s behavior is tightly connected to place and context - that eludes us. It leads us to misunderstand some of our greatest poets , to be indifferent to the suicidal, and to send police officers on senseless errands.”
Ch 12
“How many drugs did the North Carolina highway patrol find with those 400,000 searches? Seventeen. Is it really worth alienating and stigmatizing 399,983 people…”
“Yet at this most necessary of tasks we are inept. We think we can transform the stranger without cost or sacrifice, into the familiar and known, and we can’t.
To assume the best about another is the trait that has created modern society. Those occasions when our trusting nature gets violated are tragic. But the alternative - to abandon trust as a defense predation and deception - is worse.”
There is no perfect mechanism for the CIA to uncover spies in its midst, or for investors to spot schemers or frauds, or for any of the rest of us to peer, clairvoyantly, inside the minds of those we do not know. But what is required is restraint and humility. …
“… makes the task of reading others all but impossible. There are clues to making sense of a stranger. But attending to them requires
care and attention.”
“Because we don’t know how to talk to strangers, what do we do when things go awry with strangers? We blame the stranger.”
This book starts with a court case of a black woman, Sandra Bland and a cop who interrogated her after a minor traffic infraction, sending her to jail where she committed suicide.
He says, in the introduction:
“There are bad cops. There are biased cops. Conservatives prefer the former interpretation, liberals the latter. In the end the two sides canceled each other out. Police officers still kill people in this country, but those deaths no longer command the news. I suspect that you may have had to pause for a moment to remember who Sandra Bland was. We put aside these controversies after a decent interval and moved on to other things.
I don’t want to move on to other things.” P7
He goes back and forth between this case and several others. Hitler, Cuba, Larry Nasser, Amanda Knox, Chanel Miller, Sylvia Plath, and several case studies to try to understand why it is difficult to understand strangers. He uses ideas like the Friends Fallacy - that we try to gauge people by their facial expressions and we often get things wrong because people don’t often display how they feel. Instead, it takes more careful understanding of people to discern why they are acting the way they act.
—
“
But to start, I have two questions—two puzzles about strangers— “ intro
“Puzzle Number One: Why can’t we tell when the stranger in front of us is lying to our face? “ Ch 1
“…try to answer one of the biggest puzzles in human psychology: why are we so bad at detecting lies?” Ch 3
Ch 2
“The people who were right about Hitler were those who knew the least about him personally . The people who were wrong about Hitler were the ones who had talked with him for hours.”
“Puzzle Number Two: How is it that meeting a stranger can sometimes make us worse at making sense of that person than not meeting them?”
Chapter 3
If I can convince you of one thing in this book: let it be this: Strangers are not easy.
Chapter 4
That’s the consequence of not defaulting to trust. If you don’t begin in a state of trust, you can’t have meaningful social encounters.”
Chapter 5
“But defaulting to truth is not a crime. It is a fundamentally human tendency.”
We think we want our guardians to be alert to every suspicion. We blame them when they default to truth. When we send a person like Graham Spanier to jail, we send a message to all of those in authority about the way we want them to make sense of strangers - without stopping to consider the consequences of sending that message.
Chapter 6
Folk psychology is the kind of crude psychology we gain from cultural sources, such as sitcoms. But that is not the way things happen in real life.
Transparency is a myth - an idea we’ve picked up from too much television and reading too many novels where the hero’s “jaw dropped with astonishment,” or “eyes went wide with surprise.”
The unobservables create noise not signal.
Advantage that the judge has over the computer [by seeing the person] isn’t really an advantage
But the requirement of humanity means that we have to tolerate an enormous amount of error. That is the paradox of talking to strangers. We need to talk to them. But we’re terrible at it…
Ch 8
“…we nearly always miss crucial clues in the moment.”
Chapter 9
“The right way to talk with strangers is with caution and humility.”
Chapter 10
“…poets have far and away the highest suicide rates - as much as five times higher than the general population. Something about writing poetry appears either to attract the wounded or to open new wounds…”
“We do not understand the importance of the context in which the stranger is operating.”
Ch 11
“Coupling teaches us the opposite. Don’t look at the stranger and jump to conclusions. Look at the strangers world.”
“There is something about the idea of coupling - of the notion that a stranger’s behavior is tightly connected to place and context - that eludes us. It leads us to misunderstand some of our greatest poets , to be indifferent to the suicidal, and to send police officers on senseless errands.”
Ch 12
“How many drugs did the North Carolina highway patrol find with those 400,000 searches? Seventeen. Is it really worth alienating and stigmatizing 399,983 people…”
“Yet at this most necessary of tasks we are inept. We think we can transform the stranger without cost or sacrifice, into the familiar and known, and we can’t.
To assume the best about another is the trait that has created modern society. Those occasions when our trusting nature gets violated are tragic. But the alternative - to abandon trust as a defense predation and deception - is worse.”
There is no perfect mechanism for the CIA to uncover spies in its midst, or for investors to spot schemers or frauds, or for any of the rest of us to peer, clairvoyantly, inside the minds of those we do not know. But what is required is restraint and humility. …
“… makes the task of reading others all but impossible. There are clues to making sense of a stranger. But attending to them requires
care and attention.”
“Because we don’t know how to talk to strangers, what do we do when things go awry with strangers? We blame the stranger.”
Content Warnings
Moderate: Alcoholism, Rape, Suicide, Police brutality, and War
kdenten's review against another edition
informative
reflective
fast-paced
3.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Gun violence, Pedophilia, Rape, Self harm, Sexual assault, Suicide, Torture, and Suicide attempt
Minor: Alcoholism, Drug use, Mental illness, Murder, and Alcohol
montyalmoro's review against another edition
informative
medium-paced
2.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Adult/minor relationship, Alcoholism, Child abuse, Drug abuse, Drug use, Emotional abuse, Gun violence, Hate crime, Rape, Self harm, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Suicidal thoughts, Suicide, Police brutality, Suicide attempt, Alcohol, and Sexual harassment
iamvalerielane's review against another edition
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.5
Very thought provoking. Gladwell has an easy way of writing that teaches a lot about context and history. While I didn't agree with everything written in this book, and not a lot of it applies to me, I really enjoyed reflecting on the research and ideas.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Alcoholism, Racism, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Suicide, and Police brutality
missbsbookshelf's review against another edition
challenging
dark
informative
medium-paced
3.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Alcoholism, Bullying, Child abuse, Death, Domestic abuse, Drug abuse, Drug use, Emotional abuse, Gun violence, Hate crime, Mental illness, Pedophilia, Physical abuse, Rape, Self harm, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Suicidal thoughts, Suicide, Torture, Violence, Police brutality, Islamophobia, Grief, Mass/school shootings, Suicide attempt, and Murder