Book completed
Jul. 7th, 2021 02:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_primeTalking to Strangers, by Malcolm Gladwell. I hadn't read any of his books before, so I was glad when someone in our book club said she was enjoying it - she took me up on the suggestion to have it become this month's book. And now I know what they're like. At least this one!
Gladwell uses all sorts of fascinating and often lurid evidence to tell stories explaining three psychological principles he wanted to talk about. By "lurid" I mean murders, rapes, child abuse, interrogation by torture of terrorists, and Sylvia Plath's suicide (with Anne Sexton thrown in for good measure). It's still interesting to read, though pretty intense at times.. Then, throughout the whole book, he's building up to explaining what went wrong when Sandra Bland was stopped by a cop in Texas for not signalling when changing lanes, and ended up getting thrown in jail, where she committed suicide three days later.
I told J. about it late at night, and he came up with some nuanced critiques that were different from my own nuanced critiques (Gladwell is a journalist, not a scientist), but he found it interesting too.
Also, I was rather fascinated to see that in the extensive notes, he spends several pages explaining that the science on which he'd based much of his earlier book, Blink, had been shown to be invalid. So I guess I needn't go read that one as well.
Gladwell uses all sorts of fascinating and often lurid evidence to tell stories explaining three psychological principles he wanted to talk about. By "lurid" I mean murders, rapes, child abuse, interrogation by torture of terrorists, and Sylvia Plath's suicide (with Anne Sexton thrown in for good measure). It's still interesting to read, though pretty intense at times.. Then, throughout the whole book, he's building up to explaining what went wrong when Sandra Bland was stopped by a cop in Texas for not signalling when changing lanes, and ended up getting thrown in jail, where she committed suicide three days later.
I told J. about it late at night, and he came up with some nuanced critiques that were different from my own nuanced critiques (Gladwell is a journalist, not a scientist), but he found it interesting too.
Also, I was rather fascinated to see that in the extensive notes, he spends several pages explaining that the science on which he'd based much of his earlier book, Blink, had been shown to be invalid. So I guess I needn't go read that one as well.