The Kindness of Strangers

Product Information

Travel opens our minds to the world; it helps us to embrace risk and uncertainty, overcome challenges and understand the people we meet and the places we visit. But what happens when we arrive home? How do our experiences shape us?

For anyone who has ever followed the news, you know that the most horrible crimes are often committed by the seemingly most unlikely people. Friends and neighbors are almost always heard to say after the truth is discovered that they "had no idea" and "it can't be true, they're such nice people". It was good to read a book that takes this real-life rule to heart. The 'bad guys' here aren't the creepy or strange people that everyone steers clear of. Rather, they're seemingly normal family people who volunteer at school events, participate in their community, and are seemingly good friends or acquaintances to many people, all of whom have no idea of the truth until the police get involved. This book will haunt you, educate you, and hopefully let you understand the deeper issues a bit better. Yes, there are times that you want to grab one of the characters and slap them out of their denial, until you think about how you would feel in their position. For better or worse, the emotions and reactions in this book are true to real life, as unfortunate as that can sometimes be. The problem with this doctrine is that it can’t possibly be the whole, or even the most significant, part of the story. While our passions undoubtedly influence our behavior, our ideas, driven by reason, have altered human behavior more drastically over the last 10,000 years—and especially over the last 300 to 400 years—than can be accounted for by any changes in our biological makeup. I've read many books about group selection and why cooperation developed via altruism within tribes, but this book shed new light on the topics. McCullough also details the interesting history of social work and social services, which I was unaware of prior to reading the book. The Kindness of Strangers: Child Abandonment in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance, a 1988 book by John Boswell

Book Summary

Mary has lectured at many places including Harvard and the Smithsonian. Additionally, she has contributed to such diverse print and on-line publications as The Chiron Review, Redbook, and Salon. She occasionally writes comedy under the pen name "Kate Clemens". Travel is supposed to be challenging, you are out of your comfort zone, you are in unfamiliar places, often surrounded by people who don’t speak the same language as you and have a very different culture. It can pay rich dividends and give you an insight into how people live and how different it is to your way of life. These places that you see, the sunsets that you watch and the interactions that you have with other people, shape who you are. While this was a difficult book to read at times, I'm not at all sorry that I did. Sometimes the best stories make us uncomfortable, but ultimately enable us to grow as readers and as humans. This was one of the special ones. Easy to read, McCullough sounds both realistic and upbeat about our chances of, as Peter Singer puts it, "expanding the moral circle." Indeed, McCullough tells a very progressivist story, with various "eras" moving us from the selfish ape of the title to people who more and more help those totally foreign to them.

Didn't finish this mainly due to time constraints - it was from a library reading group set and needed to be returned. The arrogance is again, not only awful, but he doesn’t even seem to recognize that he really almost killed his girlfriend in multiple ways. This is a book written by solo wanderlusters for solo wanderlusters, an assemblage of journals that showcase why kindness is a universal language that transcends countries, cultures, language and race; it is an ode to travelers who have had firsthand witness to unrequited kindness that challenges xenophobic sentiments and unfair stereotypes towards selected nations. At the same time, this book is also dedicated to people who doubt the excitement and adventure that solo traveling brings, making them intrigued to go out there and start exploring the world for themselves. It's a book that shows how there is still so much about the human heart that people don't fathom, and learning how to be humble in accepting just how little we know about people in foreign lands, and thereby restoring some faith in humanity. It's an extended 'From our Own Correspondent', really, the Correspondent being Kate Adie, and she's reporting on the Japes that she experienced in her rather exciting and privileged life. Only one character is discussed as family - the BBC itself. Like a complicated father, the BBC has contradictory attributes: amateurish, dedicated, tolerant, autocratic. It is an affectionate but exasperated portrait - Adie is lacerating about management's influence on news.When she comes to the aid of a friend's young son, she finds herself embroiled in the exposure of a child sex ring. Disbelief, horror,guilt are just some of the emotions she struggles to come to terms with as the legal case against her friend grows.