so, just to back up my stunning claims about the boringness of tom friedman, his new book has received the most boring review in the history of boredom , by the mighty joseph stiglitz:
The world is flat, or at least becoming flatter very quickly, Thomas L. Friedman says in his exciting and very readable account of globalization. In this flat new world, there is a level (or at least more level) playing field in which countries like India and China, long marginalized in the global economy, are able to compete. And while Mr. Friedman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The New York Times, celebrates the new vistas opening up for these countries, he describes forcefully the challenges globalization presents for the older industrialized nations - especially the United States.
leaving aside the snooze of the premise of the book itself, let me give mr. stiglitz some tips on writing reviews. the point of a review is not to paraphrase a book's title, then pause and paraphrase it again and, what the hell, again, finishing by the time you're done with a paraphrase of the title that's 763 times as long as the title itself but has less content. "exciting," "readable," "forcefully," and the like are the empty bubbles emitted by someone who only reads blurbs, not books. "the world is at least becoming flatter very quickly," as if someone had napalmed its entire surface, as if god's wife was rolling it out like a wet dough, as if it were road-kill skunk getting thunked again and again by eighteen-wheelers, as if someone surgically removed those parts of your mind that give you access to reality and replaced them with cliches, as if.... and note to the nytimes: maybe you should have done something more than simply rehearse at the speed of plod the greatness of your boy.
Mr. Friedman is right that there are forces flattening the world, but there are other forces making it less flat. At issue is the balance between them. So is the world really much flatter than before?
ah! there's the key question. maybe it is! or maybe not! hmmm. maybe there's a nobel for whomever can figure out whether the flatterer it becomes the less flatter it remains.