This is not a book that many of us will easily pass by. At first you might laugh at the misjudgments of the CIA or DIA, but when you suddenly realize that we're all acting in the same way, you get an unsettling reaction. Malcolm Gladwell isn't referring to a famous phrase delivered by a jail chain warden to the character of Paul Newman in the classic 1967 film Cool Hand Luke: "What we have here is a failure in communication." But it's one of the few communication breakdowns he overlooks in Talking to Strangers: