Reading the e-book and listening to the audio version of Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book is an enthralling experience. The audiobook is quite different from the e-book since it has a piece of unique background music and the real recorded testimonies of all the ‘strangers’ whom the author meets. The audiobook is more like an audio-documentary. The book opens with a disturbing story. Gladwell talks about the story of Sandra Bland, an African American woman who was found hanging in her cell on July 13, 2015, after her arrest by a state trooper for a minor traffic violation. She had her own YouTube channel and the link is given below. I have attached three video links here. One is to her own channel Sandy Speaks and the other two videos are about the case (Viewer discretion is advised)
Malcolm Gladwell is my favourite non-fiction writer after Yuval Noah Harari. I like him for four books – What the Dog Saw, Focus, David and Goliath and Outliers. I have not read his Tipping Point and Blink. I hope to read them shortly. Malcolm Gladwell is my favourite because he writes about topics which are quite common but his ways of building the argument are something unique. He is easy to understand and most of his books are well-researched.
The book 'Talking to Strangers" is dedicated to his father who died in the year 2017. (Malcolm is the son of an English father, Graham Gladwell and Afro-Jamaican mother, Joyce Gladwell) In the first chapter, Malcolm talks about the police injustice that was meted out to Sandra Bland. To quote from the book “There are bad cops. There are biased cops. Conservatives prefer the former interpretation, liberals the latter. In the end, the two sides cancelled each other out. Police officers still kill people in this country, but those deaths no longer command the news. I suspect that you may have had to pause for a moment to remember who Sandra Bland was. We put aside these controversies after a decent interval and moved on to other things. I don’t want to move on to other things” (Excerpt From Malcolm Gladwell. “Talking to Strangers.” Apple Books.)
We can find parallels between this book and the other two books I am re/reading right now – The Gospel of Yudas by K.R Meera which is about the Kakkayam Police camp during the Emergency period and the other book is Hello Bastar – The Untold Story of India’s Maoist Movement by Rahul Pandita. There are numerous contemporary connections to these two books which I will talk about in my next post. Happy Reading
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