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

informative sad medium-paced

1.25

Misleading title and incredibly clumsy execution. I like Gladwell typically but this book just reads as being willfully incompetent.
If the book started in the direction of "this language barrier upon the Spaniards meeting the Aztecs created a misunderstanding repeated even in common history" I could maybe understand it and would be interested in reading about miscommunications in history. But instead we get blaming people killed by the police as "not knowing how to talk to strangers", a man raping a woman as "misreading cues because he was drunk". I genuinely cannot believe any positive reviews are actually buying this pseudopsychology built on a foundation less stable than sand. Any jab at critical thinking makes these concepts of "bad things happen because we suck at social skills" deflate like a sad balloon. Cannot believe I actually wasted my time trying to search for any ounce of a good point.
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