TALKING TO STRANGERS by Malcolm Gladwell

When we meet people for the first time - a stranger - we are programmed to want a positive interaction with that person. We greet them courteously, as we have been taught; we look for body language cues and cues in what they say or how they say things that we are familiar with, that we can relate to. We want to be liked by this new person, and have a good exchange of whatever it may be - medical advice, shop assistants, the police, our children's friends, potential work colleagues, love interest. When assessing those we aren't quite sure about, we still look for common threads and characteristics, and when some time later we find that we have been had, that that person is not whom we had let ourselves believe they were... well, then we have that massive sense of betrayal, anger, feeling like we have been a fool of. It happens to all of us and for some the consequences of this, despite maybe a nagging doubt or a little intuition antennae flapping way, can be terrible, heart breaking and long lasting.

In this latest from Malcolm Gladwell, he has taken as his starting point an exchange that occurred between a young black woman from Illinois driving in Texas with out of state plates on her car. She had just left a successful job interview at the nearby university and was on her way back to Illinois to pack up her life and start again. She is pulled over by a white traffic officer and immediately the exchange of words gets off to a bad start. The officer's prescribed list of visual cues for trouble is working overtime as he dealtswith the young woman in the car. It did not end well. Two strangers for a whom a routine traffic stop went absolutely off the rails. But why?

In his usual brilliant narrative way, weaving anecdotes, court judgements, research papers, investigations, high profile news stories, the author makes his case as to why again and again in life we fail to read people properly. Bernie Madoff and his Ponzi scheme; how Castro and his spies fooled their American counterparts; the sad story of Amanda Knox found guilty of murder in Italy simply because she didn't behave like a grieving friend should; the issue of sexual consent being given when one or both parties are clearly very intoxicated; the sports coaches and teachers who are also sexual predators and how they get away with it for years. All this and more the author covers in this fascinating insight into how we behave. In a world where we really do need to be kinder to each other, and yet also more aware and wary of those around us, this book is marvellous and easy reading. I love this author's books, I  have read them all, and own most of them, this is another really good one.