A book review of 'Thank You for Being Late' by Friedman.

1. Book Review
Thank You For Being Late

2. About the author
• Thomas Loren Friedman is an American political commentor and
the author of Thank you for being late.
• A three times Pulitzer Prize winner, he is also a regular columnist
in the New York Times.
• He has written extensively on foreign affairs, global trade, the
Middle East, globalization and environmental issues.

3. The Book
• As enthralled users of new communications devices, we are all attuned
to the transformative power of technological innovation. But what does
this phenomenon really signify? Didn’t earlier generations also
experience innovations and dislocations as ruptures? For more than a
decade, New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman has been raising his
hand to offer emphatic answers to these difficult questions. As in his
earlier writings, he again insists in “Thank You for Being Late: An
Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations” that the
present and the future are different from the past, especially in how
rapidly and significantly things change. And as his subtitle suggests, he is
remarkably sanguine about what this might portend.

4. Major content and backbone of the book
• To get us to see that things in the past were fundamentally different, Friedman first urges us
to recognize that everything now is fundamentally the same — in other words, that seemingly
discrete phenomena in our world fit into one storyline. Friedman is a lumper. And from his
perspective, developments such as cloud technology, long-distance migration, same-sex
marriage and climate change all epitomize the same trends and reflect the same forces. The
result is a sprawling book of astonishing topical breadth and apparent conceptual simplicity.
Readers will encounter all sorts of interesting content along the way — about cyber-piracy,
online education, topsoil erosion, U.S. foreign policy, South Asian start-ups and the history of
Minneapolis — but they may read the overall picture as less coherent and encouraging than
Friedman wishes.
• Friedman’s main cause for optimism is based on a trip back to St. Louis Park, the Minneapolis
suburb where he grew up. This is perhaps the most elegiac, memorable part of the book — a
piece of sustained reportage that ranks alongside “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” Friedman’s
masterly first book about the Middle East. He points out that the same communal virtues that
made Minnesota work when he was young have survived — and are still useful. But somehow,
the passages that lingered with this reader were the ones about the good old days that have
disappeared — when baseball used to be a sport that everybody could afford to watch, when
local boys like the young Friedman could caddy at the United States Open, when everybody in
Friedman’s town went to public schools.

5. Conclusion
• So, you don’t finish this book thinking everything is
going to be O.K. for the unhappy West — that “you
can dance in a hurricane.” There is no easy pill to
swallow, and most of the ones being proffered by
the extremists are poison. But after your session
with Dr. Friedman, you have a much better idea of
the forces that are upending your world, how they
work together — and what people, companies and
governments can do to prosper. You do have a
coherent narrative — an honest, cohesive
explanation for why the world is the way it is,
without miracle cures or scapegoats.

6. Created by – Pranay Rana (17BCL083)
Civil ’17 PDPU