Description: In this treatise spurred by the 2015 death of African American academic Sandra Bland in jail after a traffic stop, the author aims to figure out the strategies people use to assess strangers - to "analyze, critique them, figure out where they came from, figure out how to fix them," in other words: to understand how to balance trust and safety. The author uses a variety of examples from history and from headlines to illustrate that people size up the motivations, emotions, and trustworthiness of those they don't know both wrongly and with misplaced confidence
Review Quotes: "Talking to Strangers is a must-read... I love this book... Reading it will actually change not just how you see strangers, but how you look at yourself, the news--the world... Reading this book changed me."--Oprah Winfrey, O, The Oprah Magazine