The World is Flat is a great last-chapter of The Lexus and the Olive Tree. It’s great to use to explain parts of globalization for people, but nothing earth-shattering beyond Lexus. Better than Blueprint for Action, though.

There is a funny review of Friedman’s book by Matti Taibbi at: http://www.nypress.com/print.cfm?content_id=12841

He has a low opinion of Friedman and his book. Some excerpts:

(Friedman never forgets to name the company or the brand name; if he had written The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa would have awoken from uneasy dreams in a Sealy Posturepedic.)

On an ideological level, Friedman’s new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horses**t… It is a tale of a man who walks 10 feet in front of his house armed with a late-model Blackberry and comes back home five minutes later to gush to his wife that hospitals now use the internet to outsource the reading of CAT scans. Man flies on planes, observes the wonders of capitalism, says we’re not in Kansas anymore. (He actually says we’re not in Kansas anymore.) That’s the whole plot right there. If the underlying message is all that interests you, read no further, because that’s all there is.

The book’s genesis is conversation Friedman has with Nandan Nilekani, the CEO of Infosys. Nilekani causally mutters to Friedman: “Tom, the playing field is being leveled.” To you and me, an innocent throwaway phrase””?the level playing field being, after all, one of the most oft-repeated stock ideas in the history of human interaction. Not to Friedman. “As I left the Infosys campus that evening along the road back to Bangalore, I kept chewing on that phrase: “The playing field is being leveled.” What Nandan is saying, I thought, is that the playing field is being flattened… Flattened? Flattened? My God, he’s telling me the world is flat!”

To recap: Friedman, imagining himself Columbus, journeys toward India. Columbus, he notes, traveled in three ships; Friedman “had Lufthansa business class.” When he reaches India””?Bangalore to be specific””?he immediately plays golf. His caddy, he notes with interest, wears a cap with the 3M logo. Surrounding the golf course are billboards for Texas Instruments and Pizza Hut. The Pizza Hut billboard reads: “Gigabites of Taste.” Because he sees a Pizza Hut ad on the way to a golf course, something that could never happen in America, Friedman concludes: “No, this definitely wasn’t Kansas.”

After golf, he meets Nilekani, who casually mentions that the playing field is level. A nothing phrase, but Friedman has traveled all the way around the world to hear it. Man travels to India, plays golf, sees Pizza Hut billboard, listens to Indian CEO mutter small talk, writes 470-page book reversing the course of 2000 years of human thought. That he misattributes his thesis to Nilekani is perfect: Friedman is a person who not only speaks in malapropisms, he also hears malapropisms. Told level; heard flat. This is the intellectual version of Far Out Space Nuts, when NASA repairman Bob Denver sets a whole sitcom in motion by pressing “launch” instead of “lunch” in a space capsule. And once he hits that button, the rocket takes off.

God strike me dead if I’m joking about this. Judge for yourself. After the initial passages of the book, after Nilekani has forgotten Friedman and gone back to interacting with the sane, Friedman begins constructing a monstrous mathematical model of flatness. The baseline argument begins with a lengthy description of the “ten great flatteners,” which is basically a highlight reel of globalization tomahawk dunks from the past two decades: the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Netscape IPO, the pre-Y2K outsourcing craze, and so on.

Four hundred and 73 pages of this, folks. Is there no God?_

Volume 18, Issue 16

That collapse is number 2 is a travesty. That book is a waste of paper.

Eddie, I kinda got a Barnett vibe from Friedman on the BookTV interview. It seems like is is full of those catchphrases like Barnett is always constantly, endlessly repeating. 473 pages of that would drive me nuts!

I’ll have to agree for the most part with the reviews of the World is Flat so far. There’s some good stuff in there, but I’ve found the quality of his work (let alone is columns) going down as of late. However, he did have it once—”From Beirut to Jerusalem” was a terrific book. I think he’s become to insulated by his own success.

I enjoyed reading Collapse, what did you find so awful about it?

YH: me too, that’s why it took me so long to read it (like five months). I just kept putting it down and giving up, only to return a week later and re-read the chapter. Hunter’s point is spot-on.

In re to “New Glory”: read part of it and thought it superficial and incoherent. Its like a guy who spends six months reading a half-dozen American newspapers a day and thinks he knows a lot about America but hasn’t studied history so really he just knows a lot about what happened in the last six months.

Thomas Friendman & “The World is Flat”: I read a few pages and could tell that it wasn’t going to giving me much insight I wasn’t getting from the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg. So I didn’t read it. However, I have a friend who did, and it was revelatory; it amazed him and changed how he viewed the world. Everytime he would mention something amazing from the book, it made it clear to me that I had saved valuable time by not reading it. My friend is not uneducated, but he doesn’t follow international affairs closely at all, and so a lot of it really was new.

There is a morale here: people who read CA and comment on this blog tend to be pretty well-read on int’l affairs, and so Friedman’s thesis seems to have some validity the first time it is put forward, and increasingly more boring each time after that, because it is just anecdote after anecdote making the same well-known point. But I think this book was useful for some people.

My list (excluding those listed above):
1) Powers of War and Peace, by John Yoo,
2) The World Was Going Our Way, by Christopher Andrew
3) Dragons of Expectation, by Robert Conquest
4) Zarqawi: The New Face of al-Qaeda, by Jean-Charles Brisard
5) Al Qaeda in Europe, by Lorenzo Vidino
6) Tehren Rising, by Ilan Berman
7) Iran’s Nuclear Option, by Al Venter

I’ve only read one of the books on the Globalist list, Postwar: European History since 1945 which I thought was excellent. Assuming what he says is arguably true, I now have a much much better understanding of contemporary Europe.

Another book on their list, Foreign Babes in Beijing by Rachel DeWoskin I am probably going read. I heard her interviewed on Fresh Air on NPR. She lived in China as a child with her parents. After graduating from an Ivy League school, she decided to go to China. She was young, beautiful and Chinese-speaking, and was offered a role on a Chinese soap opera TV show despite no previous acting experience. Her character was a slutty western woman who seduced married Chinese men away from their wives. Although her Chinese was good, she was instructed to mispronounce words and use bad grammar to appear more “foreign.” You gotta love it!