Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations - Softcover

Friedman, Thomas L.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0241301440 ISBN 13: 9780241301449

Publisher: Allen Lane, 2016

Synopsis

From the Pulitzer Prize winner and No.1 international bestselling author of The World is Flat, an essential and entertaining field guide to thriving in the twenty-first century.

We all sense it - something big is going on. You feel it in your workplace. You feel it when you talk to your children. You can't miss it when you read the newspapers or watch the news. Our lives are speeding up - and it is dizzying.

In Thank You for Being Late, a work unlike any he has attempted before, Thomas L. Friedman exposes the tectonic movements that are reshaping the world today and explains how to get the most out of them.

Friedman's thesis is that to understand the twenty-first century, you need to understand that the planet's three largest forces - Moore's law (technology), the market (globalization) and Mother Nature (climate change and biodiversity loss) - are all accelerating at once, transforming the workplace, politics, geopolitics, ethics and community. An extraordinary release of energy is reshaping everything from how we hail a taxi to the fate of nations to our most intimate relationships. It is creating vast new opportunities for individuals and small groups to save the world - or perhaps to destroy it.

Thank You for Being Late is a work of contemporary history that serves as a field manual for how to think about this era of accelerations. It's also an argument for 'being late' - for pausing to appreciate this amazing historical epoch we're passing through and reflecting on its possibilities and dangers. He shows us how we can anchor ourselves as individuals in the eye of this storm, and how communities can create a 'topsoil of trust' to do the same for their increasingly diverse and digital populations.

Written with his trademark vitality, wit, and optimism, and with unequalled access to many of those at the forefront of the changes he is describing all over the world, Thank You for Being Late is Friedman's most ambitious book - and an essential guide to the present and the future.

About this title

Review

"Thomas L. Friedman is a self--confessed 'explanatory journalist'--whose goal is to be a 'translator from English to English.' And he is extremely good at it . . . it is hard to think of any other journalist who has explained as many complicated subjects to so many people . . . Now he has written his most ambitious book--part personal odyssey, part commonsense manifesto . . . As a guide for perplexed Westerners, this book is very hard to beat." --John Micklethwait, The New York Times Book Review

"[An] ambitious book . . . In a country torn by a divisive election, technological change and globalization, reconstructing social ties so that people feel respected and welcomed is more important than ever . . . Rather than build walls, [healthy communities] face their problems and solve them. In [Friedman's] telling, this is the way to make America great." --Laura Vanderkam, The Wall Street Journal

"Engaging . . . in some senses Thank You For Being Late is an extension of [Friedman's] previous works, woven in with wonderful personal stories (including admirably honest discussions about the nature of being a columnist). What gives Friedman's book a new twist is his belief that upheaval in 2016 is actually far more dramatic than earlier phases . . . Friedman also argues that Americans need to discover their sense of 'community, ' and uses his home town of Minneapolis to demonstrate this." --Gillian Tett, Financial Times

"The globe-trotting New York Times columnist's most famous book was about the world being flat. This one is all about the world being fast . . . His main piece of advice for individuals, corporations, and countries is clear: Take a deep breath and adapt. This world isn't going to wait for you." --Fortune

"[A] humane and empathetic book." --David Henkin, The Washington Post

"[Friedman's] latest engrossingly descriptive analysis of epic trends and their consequences . . . Friedman offers tonic suggestions for fostering 'moral innovation' and a commitment to the common good in this detailed and clarion inquiry, which, like washing dirty windows, allows us to see far more clearly what we've been looking at all along . . . his latest must-read." --Booklist (starred review)

"The three-time Pulitzer winner puts his familiar methodology--extensive travel, thorough reporting, interviews with the high-placed movers and shakers, conversations with the lowly moved and shaken--to especially good use here . . . He prescribes nothing less than a redesign of our workplaces, politics, geopolitics, ethics, and communities . . . Required reading for a generation that's 'going to be asked to dance in a hurricane.'" --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

About the Author

Thomas L. Friedman has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize three times for his work with The New York Times, where he serves as the foreign affairs columnist, and is read by everyone from small-business owners to President Obama. Friedman is also the author of From Beirut to Jerusalem (1989), which won both the National Book Award and the Overseas Press Club Award, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999), Longitudes and Attitudes (2002), The World Is Flat (2005), which won the first Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award, and Hot, Flat, and Crowded (2008). He lives in Bethesda, Maryland.

Edition details

• Publisher: Allen Lane
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0241301440
• ISBN 13: 9780241301449
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 496