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Loading... The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Centuryby Thomas L. Friedman
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Fascinating stories showing the enormous changes globalization has already instigated in society. The first half of the book is as full of suspense as a thriller, then Friedman tends to get a little too lengthy putting forward some theses too many... Still: a great read for people interested in how a global economy changes and is to change all of our lives. (  )DieterBoehm | May 25, 2009 |   In school we had to read book and I think that this book opened my eyes more about the flating of the world because of the storys he told that he went on to India, China, etc. (  )Conner23456 | Apr 18, 2009 | Thomas Friedman calls every CEO he can find in his large Rolodex and says, "Hey you guys doing anything to reduce wages in the USA so that profits can increase for Multinational corporations?" Oh, you are? Great how about I come out and chat with you and we eat some expensive food, golf, and take a dip in the pool. Then we can chat about how great capitalism is... (  )RyanRobinson | Apr 15, 2009 | 3  I cannot figure out why this book is so popular. It brings vivid insight but nothing extraordinary. If anything, Friedman lacks an instinctive will to call any thought his own; for a journalist, reporting the quotes of others is acceptable and encouraged. For an author, 635 pages of that is nonsense. Like Mario Livio in "The Golden Ratio," Friedman makes special note of who his friends are (and it seems he has an awful lot of them), so I question what his true motives were in writing the book. The terminology was jargon, and he seemed rather fatalistic. Still, there was something very appealing about this book, and it certainly was in the upper half of authorship. (  )jrgoetziii | Apr 7, 2009 | A könyv érdekes összefoglaló a globalizációról, de sajnos a magyar változatban rengeteg az elütés. ( )rics | Apr 5, 2009 | 0.115 seconds to build listing  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0374292795, Hardcover)Updated Edition: Thomas L. Friedman is not so much a futurist, which he is sometimes called, as a presentist. His aim in The World Is Flat, as in his earlier, influential Lexus and the Olive Tree, is not to give you a speculative preview of the wonders that are sure to come in your lifetime, but rather to get you caught up on the wonders that are already here. The world isn't going to be flat, it is flat, which gives Friedman's breathless narrative much of its urgency, and which also saves it from the Epcot-style polyester sheen that futurists--the optimistic ones at least--are inevitably prey to.What Friedman means by "flat" is "connected": the lowering of trade and political barriers and the exponential technical advances of the digital revolution that have made it possible to do business, or almost anything else, instantaneously with billions of other people across the planet. This in itself should not be news to anyone. But the news that Friedman has to deliver is that just when we stopped paying attention to these developments--when the dot-com bust turned interest away from the business and technology pages and when 9/11 and the Iraq War turned all eyes toward the Middle East--is when they actually began to accelerate. Globalization 3.0, as he calls it, is driven not by major corporations or giant trade organizations like the World Bank, but by individuals: desktop freelancers and innovative startups all over the world (but especially in India and China) who can compete--and win--not just for low-wage manufacturing and information labor but, increasingly, for the highest-end research and design work as well. (He doesn't forget the "mutant supply chains" like Al-Qaeda that let the small act big in more destructive ways.) Friedman has embraced this flat world in his own work, continuing to report on his story after his book's release and releasing an unprecedented hardcover update of the book a year later with 100 pages of revised and expanded material. What's changed in a year? Some of the sections that opened eyes in the first edition--on China and India, for example, and the global supply chain--are largely unaltered. Instead, Friedman has more to say about what he now calls "uploading," the direct-from-the-bottom creation of culture, knowledge, and innovation through blogging, podcasts, and open-source software. And in response to the pleas of many of his readers about how to survive the new flat world, he makes specific recommendations about the technical and creative training he thinks will be required to compete in the "New Middle" class. As before, Friedman tells his story with the catchy slogans and globe-hopping anecdotes that readers of his earlier books and his New York Times columns know well, and he holds to a stern sort of optimism. He wants to tell you how exciting this new world is, but he also wants you to know you're going to be trampled if you don't keep up with it. A year later, one can sense his rising impatience that our popular culture, and our political leaders, are not helping us keep pace. --Tom Nissley Where Were You When the World Went Flat? And now you can listen to our second interview, in which he talks about the updates he's made in "The World Is Flat 2.0," including his response to parents who said to him, "Great, Mr. Friedman, I'm glad you told us the world is flat. Now what do I tell my kids?" The Essential Tom Friedman
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:57 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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Thomas L. Friedman's reporter's curiosity and his ability to recognize the patterns behind the most complex global developments have made him one of the most entertaining and authoritative sources for information about the wider world we live in, both as the foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times and as the author of landmark books like From Beirut to Jerusalem and The Lexus and the Olive Tree. They also make him an endlessly fascinating conversation partner, and we've now had the chance to talk to him about The World Is Flat twice. Read our original interview with him following the publication of the first edition of The World Is Flat to learn why there's almost no one from Washington, D.C., listed in the index of a book about the global economy, and what his one-plank platform for president would be. (Hint: his bumper stickers would say, "Can You Hear Me Now?") 
