January 2024 Book Club: Talking to Strangers

This month, we are reading nonfiction! The book chosen was Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell.

PLEASE NOTE: This month, we will be limiting the RSVP to 30 people, as I am possibly looking into a new venue that only accommodates up to 30.
Please only RSVP if you can come, and un-RSVP If you can’t make it anymore, to make room for others who may want to join!

Goodreads description of the book below:

How did Fidel Castro fool the CIA for a generation? Why did Neville Chamberlain think he could trust Adolf Hitler? Why are campus sexual assaults on the rise? Do television sitcoms teach us something about the way we relate to one another that isn’t true?

Talking to Strangers is a classically Gladwellian intellectual adventure, a challenging and controversial excursion through history, psychology, and scandals taken straight from the news. He revisits the deceptions of Bernie Madoff, the trial of Amanda Knox, the suicide of Sylvia Plath, the Jerry Sandusky pedophilia scandal at Penn State University, and the death of Sandra Bland—throwing our understanding of these and other stories into doubt.

Something is very wrong, Gladwell argues, with the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don’t know. And because we don’t know how to talk to strangers, we are inviting conflict and misunderstanding in ways that have a profound effect on our lives and our world. In his first book since his #1 bestseller David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell has written a gripping guidebook for troubled times.