“The World is Flat” by Thomas L. Friedman

Yesterday it was a local holiday, so I managed to finish the book “The World is Flat” by Thomas L. Friedman.

Well, thousands of pages are devoted to this book, so everybody has probably heard about it already… The book deals with globalization, and at times it is interesting reading, but overall I don’t think I would recommend it. Basically my main criticisms are: the book is too long, at around 635 pages with a small font; the view is too American centered; it has way too many anecdotical evidence, long e-mail excerpts, etc., and one has the impression that the same ideas are repeated over and over.

I was about to put it down quite a number of times, but at least it was good that I didn’t, since I found the latest chapters the most interesting ones (the ones that deal with moral issues of globalization, the negative aspects of globalization, etc.). The first chapters spend too much time discussing the incredible feats that you can do thanks to globalization, and this is perhaps more interesting for other people, but for people like me, who basically every day communicate with people around the globe, make use of the so-called Web 2.0, etc. it comes as not very new information (some obviously does, but I guess is not something as striking as to find nearly 500 pages of it amusing).

I think if the book was a bit more concise and if it had more data, and not so many opinions, it could have been more valuable…