A Book A Week

"Because we do not know how to talk to strangers, what do we do when things go awry with strangers? We blame the stranger."

This has been a strange week for me. I go back to work today after 10 weeks of working from home. I'm excited to finally return and be able to interact with my co-workers from beyond just video conferencing, but I'm also a little anxious about living in this new version of normal. All things considered, it should have been no surprise that I had trouble focussing on reading. In fact, I started reading no less than four other books before settling on this week's read. I just couldn't find a groove with the books I thought that I wanted to read. I ended up veering a bit outside of my normal reading habits to read Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell. This was a Christmas gift from my boss, so it had been sitting on my shelf for a few months. Something about Gladwell's matter-of-fact explanations of a complex subject really worked for me. Before I knew it, I was 100 pages in, thoroughly invested, and finally able to focus on reading.

Talking to someone you don't know, someone who maybe does not have the shared experiences you do, the same political leanings, or maybe even someone who does not speak the same language as you can be inherently challenging. Gladwell presents the challenge of talking with strangers through a case study of the infamous traffic stop of Sandra Bland. If you're not familiar with this tragic story, I'll give a brief rundown now. Bland was an African-American student who was pulled over for what should have played out as a routine traffic stop. She was annoyed at the stop, and the officer reacted in a way that led to the arrest of Bland. She committed suicide in her jail cell. Gladwell posits that this scenario was the result of the officer failing to properly respond to various verbal and non-verbal cues, ultimately culminating in the unnecessary death of an innocent woman. On a larger scale, he believes this points to a general failure of society to carry to proper tools to effectively communicate with strangers.

From this, Gladwell then explores three main ideas through other anecdotal evidence. The first is the idea that people generally default to the truth when speaking to people they don't know. We are essentially wired to believe anything that can't be easily contradicted. The second is related to the idea of transparency, the idea that we rely on non-verbal hints as much as what the person says. Gladwell specifically mentions how culture can change the way body language and facial expression matches with the intent of words. Finally, Gladwell delves into the idea of coupling. This is the idea that the context of a person's life directly impacts their behavior in specific circumstances. He combines these three examples to help make sense of the Sandra Bland story and to provide us with ways to be aware of how we interact with strangers in our own lives.

Frankly, I wasn't expecting Talking to Strangers to be as compulsively readable as it was. Gladwell has the unique ability to distill complex concepts and situations down to be understandable without betraying the innate intricacies that each of them holds. I found his writing to be fairly balanced toward both sides of his examples, even when my own emotional response leaned more toward one truth than the counter perspectives he provided. Examples of rape and pedophilia in specific were difficult for me to see both sides of. In the end, I'm not sure Gladwell presented any revelatory advice beyond what I already knew. If anything, his examples have simply made me more aware of the ways I interact with people I do not know. And maybe that is the most we can hope for from a book like this. In a time when people seem more divided than ever, Talking With Strangers is the kind of tool that gives us the perspective to try to better interact with the stranger that we encounter in our own lives.

For more information, visit the author's website, Amazon, and Goodreads.
(2020, 23)