This is a repackaging of Friedman's New York Times columns from September 2001 through June 2002, with a lengthy postscript describing Friedman's travels and interviews throughout this period. The one article in this batch likely to draw the most attention is his February 17, 2002, column in which the heir to the Saudi Arabian throne proposed a land-for-peace resolution, premised on Israel's 1967 borders. Whatever its merits--and it predictably foundered in the real world's storm of Islamic terrorists and certain governments vowing the utter destruction of Israel and Jews--Friedman learned significant things in conversation with the Saudi ruler, educated Saudis, and others in the Muslim world. He recounts their doubts that the September 11 terrorists were Saudi grown, their proclivity for bizarre conspiracy-thinking (anti-Semitic, of course) to explain or even justify the atrocity, and numberless complaints about America. With these disquieting attitudes discussed from the lectern, Friedman's 16-city promotional tour will undoubtedly be an animated and heated one. Gilbert Taylor
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Review
“This lucid book, consisting of Friedman's exceptionally frank and convincing columns and an insightful post-September 11 diary, prods at the questions surrounding that day and offers an invaluable reporter's perspective on the world from outside U.S. borders. The previously unpublished diary offers the most insight to the state of the world after September 11.” ―Publishers Weekly
About the Author
Thomas L. Friedman is an internationally renowned author, reporter, and columnist―the recipient of three Pulitzer Prizes and the author of five bestselling books, among them From Beirut to Jerusalem and The World Is Flat.
He was born in Minneapolis in 1953, and grew up in the middle-class Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park. He graduated from Brandeis University in 1975 with a degree in Mediterranean studies, attended St. Antony's College, Oxford, on a Marshall Scholarship, and received an M.Phil. degree in modern Middle East studies from Oxford.
After three years with United Press International, he joined The New York Times, where he has worked ever since as a reporter, correspondent, bureau chief, and columnist. At the Times, he has won three Pulitzer Prizes: in 1983 for international reporting (from Lebanon), in 1988 for international reporting (from Israel), and in 2002 for his columns after the September 11th attacks.
Friedman's first book, From Beirut to Jerusalem, won the National Book Award in 1989. His second book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (1999), won the Overseas Press Club Award for best book on foreign policy in 2000. In 2002 FSG published a collection of his Pulitzer Prize-winning columns, along with a diary he kept after 9/11, as Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11. His fourth book, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century (2005) became a #1 New York Times bestseller and received the inaugural Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in November 2005. A revised and expanded edition was published in hardcover in 2006 and in 2007. The World Is Flat has sold more than 4 million copies in thirty-seven languages.
In 2008 he brought out Hot, Flat, and Crowded, which was published in a revised edition a year later. His sixth book, That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back, co-written with Michael Mandelbaum, was published in September 2011.
Thomas L. Friedman lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with his family.
