Talking To Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell

TALKING TO STRANGERS by Malcolm Gladwell is his latest work and explores “What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know.”  As is his style, Gladwell uses multiple real-life examples to illustrate his points.  Here, he refers to the cases of Brock Turner (convicted Stanford rapist), Amanda Knox, Bernie Madoff, Adolf Hitler, and the perils of community policing which led to Sandra Bland’s death. Gladwell explores the psychology related to the “Stranger Problem” by describing the work of Tim Levine and his commentary on our tendency to “default to truth,” often misunderstanding or “giving the benefit of the doubt,” believing the stranger when we should tend to be more skeptical. While entertaining as always, it was sometimes difficult to reconcile Gladwell’s analysis with racism, sexism and other unconscious biases which may have as much or more impact on our interactions. In The Washington Post, Wray Herbert remarked upon Gladwell’s “impressive range of historical conundrums,” but also noted that he “dances around the topic of torture” and provides an “unconvincing and troubling” analysis regarding Sandra Bland. Gladwell has written numerous best-sellers (The Tipping Point, Outliers, Blink) and TALKING TO STRANGERS garnered much attention. Carol Tavris, writing for the Wall Street Journal, described Gladwell as “an enjoyable raconteur, but a somewhat lazy researcher” so that for this particular book, it’s “often hard to find the chocolate in the trail mix.” TALKING TO STRANGERS did receive a starred review from Kirkus.

The Optimist's Telescope by Bina Venkataraman

THE OPTIMIST'S TELESCOPE by Bina Venkataraman begins with a story about not treating a rash and subsequently having to deal with the effects of a tick bite; as the author says, “Smart people make reckless decisions, despite clear warnings.” Venkataraman, currently director of Global Policy Initiatives at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, explores why “sometimes people, businesses, and communities do avert crisis and act for the sake of the future” when others fail to do so. The author encourages long term thinking versus settling for immediate gratification or short-term decisions. She surveys a variety of case studies, including increased flooding and natural disasters sparked by hurricanes and climate change, or financial decisions, or historical events, like the Cuban Missile Crisis. Our students and teachers will appreciate the comfortable, conversational tone of this text. In one example, the author describes how college students react after seeing virtual reality avatars of their older selves. Later, Venkataraman includes a section on war games that refers to their “long history of shaping military history” and of including a “twist” so as to “explore what decisions they [players] would make when caught by surprise and what potential downside or upside consequences could emerge.” THE OPTIMIST'S TELESCOPE, subtitled “Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age,” is a thoughtful text worth perusing; it includes detailed notes and a helpful index.

The Heartland by Kristin L. Hoganson

THE HEARTLAND is an American history written by Kristin L. Hoganson, the Stanley S. Stroup Professor of United States History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Here, Hoganson argues that “our assumptions about the heartland are so deeply rooted that they can withstand counter-evidence howling as loud as the prairie winds.” At one point, she describes the heartland as “a psychic fallout shelter in which to seek refuge from a changing and dangerous world. … America bound the center of their country up in myth.”  Using Champaign, Illinois as a starting point, she explores themes of “human mobility, border brokering, economic ties, alliance politics, geographic awareness, and homeland insecurities.”  Her chapters discuss displacement of the Kickapoo people, foreign university students in the early 1900s, and an agrarian society’s relationships with the larger world. THE HEARTLAND received starred reviews from Kirkus and Publisher’s Weekly. That second review says, “Hoganson's book will attract many scholars as well as general readers who like innovative, challenging history,” but are those the readers who reside there and who may fail to appreciate the Native American and immigrant heritage, the global ties and connections described in this book?  

Hoganson herself notes, “Americans persist in imaging a heart” and she made me think of a quote from Breakfast Served Anytime by Sarah Combs: “right at the place the country’s heart would be if it placed its hand across its chest to say the Pledge of Allegiance,” referring to Kentucky. That in turn, led me to recent work by the Rockefeller Institute on individual states’ balance of payments. Just look at Kentucky (third from the bottom) which pays in a little over 30 billion dollars and receives over 70 billion, for a subsidy of around 40 billion, roughly nine thousand dollars per person per year. Yet, when we have a dialogue about “handouts,” the recipients are often characterized as people of color, even though Kentucky is more white (88% vs. 64% nationally) and native born (96 % vs. 87%) - also less educated (22% with bachelor degrees vs. 30%) - than the country. Overall, there is much more immediacy regarding economic and political issues in titles like the award-winning Heartland by Sarah Smarsh or The View from Flyover Country by Sarah Kendzior. I frankly wonder to what extent ANY of us – whether we live in flyover country or not, really understand the heartland. Have we become too separated, too enmeshed in our own silos? What does that portend for democracy? Hoganson comments, “no wonder the heartland myth came to seem so commonsensical: its scaled up localness was far easier to grasp than the vast complexity of the real world.”

New texts dealing with history and its interpretation

THE END OF THE MYTH by Greg Grandin (Fordlandia) is subtitled “From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America.” Grandin begins with a reference to Frederick Jackson Turner in the very first sentence of his introduction, soon noting that “the kind of Americanism Turner represented took all the unbounded optimism that went into the founding of the United States and bet that the country’s progress, moving forward on the frontier and into the world, would reduce racism to a remnant … would dilute other social problems as well, … teaching diverse people how to live together in peace.” Contrast that with Grandin’s last sentence, quoting Donald Trump on keeping out Central American asylum seekers: “Barbed wire can be a beautiful sight.” In between, Grandin uses chapters with titles like “All that Space,” “The Safety Valve,” “A Psychological Twist,” and “More, More, More” to explore America’s border myth, expansionist policies, changing identity, and recent disenchantment. Called “troubling, but inspiring,” this new, and at times controversial, work by an award-winning author contains roughly sixty pages of notes and a detailed index.

BENDING TOWARD JUSTICE by Doug Jones is subtitled “The Birmingham Church Bombing that Changed the Course of Civil Rights.”  The newly elected Senator from Alabama is a former US Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama where he prosecuted former KKK members for their roles in the 1963 bombing. In Part One of this text, he first describes events leading up to the bombing, the event itself (which occurred when Jones was 9 years old), and then the prosecution by Alabama’s Attorney General, William Baxley, eventually leading to one conviction in 1977.  Subsequent sections describe Jones’ own career and activities as a prosecutor, mainly in obtaining the convictions in early the 2000s.  The book contains several plates of black and white images, primarily of Jones and/or his family. BENDING TOWARD JUSTICE offers firsthand accounts and another perspective on an historic event – one that took nearly forty years to achieve a legal resolution.