Geoffrey Wheatcroft reviews Thomas Friedman's Longitudes and Attitudes in the New York Times:
"'Longitudes and Attitudes'' is a collection of columns, from December 2000 to this past July, broken by September's great caesura, and including material from his diary, notes made but not used as he traveled to the Persian Gulf, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Indonesia, India, Saudi Arabia, London, Brussels. . . .
"For years, Friedman's big idea has been free enterprise in its new form of globalization: ''the inexorable integration of markets, transportation systems and communication systems to a degree never witnessed before,'' which he believed would solve most of the world's ills. Not that ''the maximum of intercourse between nations'' was a new notion, or a bad one. Long before we had heard of the Web, Richard Cobden put it splendidly in 1850 when he said that ''the progress of freedom depends more upon the maintenance of peace, the spread of commerce and the diffusion of education, than upon the labors of cabinets and foreign offices.'"
Both Friedman's idea that commerce cures all ills and his prediction of coming disaster in the Middle East are profoundly disconcerting. Naturally, I am adding this book to my list of books to read.
8:59:57 PM 
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