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Outstanding
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Publishers Weekly
This is all familiar stuff by now, but the last 100 pages on the economic and political roots of global Islamism are filled with the kind of close reporting and intimate yet accessible analysis that have been hard to come by. [28 Mar 2005, p.68]
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Favorable
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Boston Globe Michael Langan
A tantalizing look at the future.
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Favorable
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Christian Science Monitor Clayton Jones
No one today chronicles global shifts in simple and practical terms quite like Friedman.
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Favorable
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The Globe And Mail [Toronto] David Ticoll
The book is longer than necessary; many of the stories are oft-told business press tales. Occasionally, Friedman hyperventilates. His sections on the changes in business are unnecessarily repetitive and redundant; they also broadcast wrong explanations of some key concepts. However, this is an important book. [30 Apr 2005, p.D14]
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Favorable
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The Guardian John Kampfner
In the crowded market of globalisation books, this is an entertaining, informative and occasionally annoying addition.
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Favorable
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The Independent John Gray
Like Friedman's earlier books, The World Is Flat unrelentingly upbeat in tone, but its subtext about energy independence and the perils of free trade points to a future rather different from the one he is boosting: one in which America scales back its over-extended global role, and turns inwards to build globalisation in one country.
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Favorable
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The Independent A C Grayling
Friedman's book is an essential read for anyone interested to know where the next lightning-fast passage of travel over the surface of our ever-more-flattened earth is going to take us.
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Favorable
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Washington Post Warren Bass
Showcases Friedman's gift for lucid dissections of abstruse economic phenomena, his teacher's head, his preacher's heart, his genius for trend-spotting and his sometimes maddening inability to take himself out of the frame.
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Favorable
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The Spectator Graham Stewart
Friedman, although not the most subtle of literary stylists, is one of a small number of communicators who writes intelligibly about trends in international economics and the effect they have on all of us.
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Favorable
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The New York Times Book Review Fareed Zakaria
Excellent... [but] once Friedman gets through explicating his main point, he throws in too many extras.
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Mixed
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The Nation George Scialabba
Whatever one thinks of Friedman as an analyst (and I'd say there's only one possible opinion of him as a prose stylist), he's an energetic reporter and a good storyteller.
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Mixed
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New York Review Of Books John Gray
The metaphor of a flat world is worked relentlessly throughout this overlong book, but it is not its incessant repetition that is most troublesome. It is Friedman's failure to recognize that in many ways, some of them not difficult to observe, the world is becoming distinctly less flat.
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Mixed
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Los Angeles Times Jacob Heilbrunn
Important, provocative and infuriating.... With his extensive travels, sharp pen and inquiring mind, he could have written a canonic text about free-market capitalism at home and abroad. This is not it. [24 Apr 2005, p.R11]
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Mixed
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Daily Telegraph Robert Hanks
Despite all these problems, The World Is Flat works well as an invigorating sketch of the world to come.
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Mixed
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Kirkus Reviews
Those who look forward to a planet of Wal-Marts and Dells will be charmed. [15 Mar 2005, p.332]
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Unfavorable
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Daily Telegraph Noel Malcolm
Those who like colourful anecdotes and wisdom served in bite-sized pieces will enjoy this book. Those who want to read something written as if by a grown-up for other grown-ups should turn to the outstanding recent book by Martin Wolf, Why Globalization Works, instead.
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Unfavorable
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The New Republic Ronald Steel
Admirers of The Lexus and the Olive Tree will no doubt find much to admire again, and also much that is familiar in this exuberant and extremely wordy book. But despite its numbing length and its plethora of detail, Friedman's book tells us very little. And what it does tell us is considerably less interesting than what it ought to be telling us.
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Unfavorable
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TLS: The Times Literary Supplement Martin Walker
Friedman's book is written in the breathless but didactic style that characterizes self-help books or health magazines.
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Unfavorable
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Village Voice Joshua Clover
The World Is Flat is no more a study of global economics than Batman Begins is a social-policy treatise.
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Unfavorable
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The Guardian Richard Adams
Friedman's writing style would still grate, but it would not matter so much if there were any value in his argument. There isn't.
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Unfavorable
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The Economist
A dreary failure.... Mr Friedman's problem is not a lack of detail. It is that he has so little to say.
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Terrible
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San Francisco Chronicle Roberto J. Gonzalez
Culturally misinformed, historically inadequate and intellectually impoverished.... A sobering reminder of the intellectual paralysis gripping our society today.
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