All Connected Now: Life In The First Global Civilization (edition 2003)

Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 081334154X, Paperback)

The trouble with books about globalization is that so many of them seem to focus on economics to the exclusion of everything else. In All Connected Now, author Walter Truett Anderson treats economics as no less important to globalization than culture, politics, and even biology. ("Far less frequently cited than Moore's Law, but likely to be at least as significant for all the world's economics and ecosystems in the years ahead, is the doubling time of genetic information.") The result is a helpful primer on what globalization may have in store for us, written by a two-cheers advocate. Anderson says we now live in a world of open systems: "There are no longer any closed cultural systems in the world, nor are there any closed biological systems; every culture develops new points of articulation with other cultures, every ecosystem is visited by exotic foreigners and affected by global events." "The emergent global civilization" will face many challenges, but it also holds out the promise of "individual human lives richer in meaning and experience than we have ever before imagined possible." --John Miller