Stranger Things

Anyone interested in poetry knows the story of Sylvia Plath’s life and tragic death: the young Smith College grad with a genius IQ, her depressions, her studies at Cambridge University, the handsome philandering poet-husband, her head in a gas oven in a chilly London flat, when she was only thirty. “Something about writing poetry appears either to attract the wounded or to open new wounds,” writes Malcolm Gladwell in his new book, Talking to Strangers.

We have learned to expect the unexpected angle from Gladwell, and he does not disappoint here. He tells the story of Plath’s 1963 suicide in a new way by putting it in the context of the British gas industry. It turns out that cooking gas at the time, known as town gas, was manufactured from coal and contained a lethal mix of hydrogen, methane, carbon dioxide, nitrogen and carbon monoxide. It offered troubled individuals, as Gladwell observes, a simple way to commit suicide in the privacy of their own...