The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century

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Thomas L. Friedman is not so much a futurist, which he is sometimes called, as a presentist. His aim, in his new book, The World Is Flat, as in his earlier, influential Lexus and the Olive Tree, is not to give you a speculative preview of the wonders that are sure to come in your lifetime, but rather to get you caught up on the wonders that are already here. The world isn't going to be flat, it is flat, which gives Friedman's breathless narrative much of its urgency, and which also saves it from the Epcot-style polyester sheen that futurists--the optimistic ones at least--are inevitably prey to.

What Friedman means by "flat" is "connected": the lowering of trade and political barriers and the exponential technical advances of the digital revolution have made it possible to do business, or almost anything else, instantaneously with billions of other people across the planet. This in itself should not be news to anyone. But the news that Friedman has to deliver is that just when we stopped paying attention to these developments--when the dot-com bust turned interest away from the business and technology pages and when 9/11 and the Iraq War turned all eyes toward the Middle East--is when they actually began to accelerate. Globalization 3.0, as he calls it, is driven not by major corporations or giant trade organizations like the World Bank, but by individuals: desktop freelancers and innovative startups all over the world (but especially in India and China) who can compete--and win--not just for low-wage manufacturing and information labor but, increasingly, for the highest-end research and design work as well. (He doesn't forget the "mutant supply chains" like Al-Qaeda that let the small act big in more destructive ways.) Friedman tells his eye-opening story with the catchy slogans and globe-hopping anecdotes that readers of his earlier books and his New York Times columns will know well, and also with a stern sort of optimism. He wants to tell you how exciting this new world is, but he also wants you to know you're going to be trampled if you don't keep up with it. His book is an excellent place to begin. --Tom Nissley

Where Were You When the World Went Flat?

Thomas L. Friedman's reporter's curiosity and his ability to recognize the patterns behind the most complex global developments have made him one of the most entertaining and authoritative sources for information about the wider world we live in, both as the foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times and as the author of landmark books like From Beirut to Jerusalem and The Lexus and the Olive Tree. They also make him an endlessly fascinating conversation partner, and we'd happily have peppered him with questions about The World Is Flat for hours. Read our interview to learn why there's almost no one from Washington, D.C., listed in the index of a book about the global economy, and what his one-plank platform for president would be. (Hint: his bumper stickers would say, "Can You Hear Me Now?")

The Essential Tom Friedman

From Beirut to Jerusalem
The Lexus and the Olive Tree
Longitudes and Attitudes

More on Globalization and Development

China, Inc. by Ted Fishman
Three Billion New Capitalists by Clyde Prestowitz
The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs

Globalization and Its Discontents by Joseph Stiglitz
The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy by Pietra Rivoli
The Mystery of Capital by Hernando de Soto

Book Description

When scholars write the history of the world twenty years from now, and they come to the chapter "Y2K to March 2004," what will they say was the most crucial development? The attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11 and the Iraq war? Or the convergence of technology and events that allowed India, China, and so many other countries to become part of the global supply chain for services and manufacturing, creating an explosion of wealth in the middle classes of the world's two biggest nations, giving them a huge new stake in the success of globalization? And with this "flattening" of the globe, which requires us to run faster in order to stay in place, has the world gotten too small and too fast for human beings and their political systems to adjust in a stable manner?

In this brilliant new book, the award-winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman demystifies the brave new world for readers, allowing them to make sense of the often bewildering global scene unfolding before their eyes. With his inimitable ability to translate complex foreign policy and economic issues, Friedman explains how the flattening of the world happened at the dawn of the twenty-first century; what it means to countries, companies, communities, and individuals; and how governments and societies can, and must, adapt. The World Is Flat is the timely and essential update on globalization, its successes and discontents, powerfully illuminated by one of our most respected journalists.

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The Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist gives a bold, timely, and surprising picture of the state of globalization in the twenty-first century

Customer Reviews:

The World is Flat.......2007-10-23

Had to return the book. I wanted the 3.0 version but only the 2.0 was available. Too bad!!!

An important look into the development of the world, for the common person.......2007-10-23

I am a common person. I am not a computer-geek, or a technology junkie, or even an avid reader of Times or other such publications of the world as we know it. I am too busy, and so this was a lovely book to help bring to my awareness the situation of our world's commerce, trade and technological developments as they are today.

Covering a wide range of subjects, from political to environmental, to health-care and education, our author provides a good, clear look into the world of outsourcing, "in-sourcing", technological advances, and the political arena in which everything comes together. He provides a mostly objective report on such subjects, so widly influencing the world.

For anyone interested in the future of our nation and of the world, business, trade, politics, or life in general, this is a great resource. Of course, it certainly is a lot of heavy reading, and the author tends to get wordy from time to time. But overall, this book is well researched and well written.

My main complaint is that he steps into the political side of things a bit more than I believe this book warrants. He gives his opinion on what certain individuals should do to solve the problems, and uses the book as a platform for his area of interest. I support his research and expertise on the subjects at hand, but do not feel that the "call to action" was either appropriately executed or even thorough enough given the subjects covered, for it to be a valid part of the book. Other than that, great job!

...and so is this book.......2007-10-10

Though it has become an immensely popular book, Friedman's work is fairly shallow and simplistic. It is important to remember that this is a world analysis written by a journalist, not by a political economist or any type of economist or political scientist. His views are oversimplified and his support relies heavily on anecdote, making his 600-pager about 400 pages too long. We read it for a poli sci class and proceeded to tear it apart intellectually.

Ranks up there with Common Sense, Uncle Toms Cabin, The Femine Mystique.......2007-10-10

One of the greatest books ever written. Everyone in America should read this book. Every teacher in America should read and teach Frieman's lessons. Every parent should read and help prepare their children for the world that is coming. Every student should read and begin to prepare for the world they are going to face. This is the most important book of our times, bar none.

Embracing Business Globalization's Irreversibility.......2007-10-10

This is easily the most relevant book written on the new realities of business globalization, its irreversibility, and the practical consequences to our future. Friedman does an excellent job describing the numerous factors that led up to our current global economy including the ongoing fall of communism, the advent of the personal computer, and the ubiquity of the Internet. His historical review and assessment is fascinating and it sets up the reader to understand the context for his theories and practical applications. Friedman delves into numerous industries, businesses, personalities, case studies, technologies, psychological factors, and sociological factors. Although he covers numerous business, technological, and economic concepts, his writing style is very engaging and entertaining, using many personal examples and narratives, thereby holding the reader's interest. Rather than bemoaning some of the common perceived negative consequences of a global economy (such as US auto workers losing jobs to overseas cheaper labor) Friedman helps the reader to understand business globalization's irreversibility. In so doing, he describes many personal, practical, and business strategies for thriving in this new environment. Friedman is realistic and compassionate concerning the changes and the challenges. He states, "the great challenge for our time will be to absorb these changes in ways that do not overwhelm people but also do not leave them behind. None of this will be easy. But this is our task. It is inevitable and unavoidable" (pp. 46-47). As Friedman unfolds his strategies, he gives the reader a broader, global perspective that is filled with hope and excitement. Whether as a CEO, a business student, or a brand new professional embarking upon a career, this book is insightful, practical, and essential reading.

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Smart, Interesting and Easy to Read
Don't expect a textbook
Crowds Oh Wisdom
Food for thought
Surowiecki is a gifted teacher

The Wisdom of Crowds
James Surowiecki
Manufacturer: Anchor
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0385721706
Release Date: 2005-08-16

Book Description

In this fascinating book, New Yorker business columnist James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea: Large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant–better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future.

With boundless erudition and in delightfully clear prose, Surowiecki ranges across fields as diverse as popular culture, psychology, ant biology, behavioral economics, artificial intelligence, military history, and politics to show how this simple idea offers important lessons for how we live our lives, select our leaders, run our companies, and think about our world.

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The Wisdom of Crowds

I

If, years hence, people remember anything about the TV game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, they will probably remember the contestants' panicked phone calls to friends and relatives. Or they may have a faint memory of that short-lived moment when Regis Philbin became a fashion icon for his willingness to wear a dark blue tie with a dark blue shirt. What people probably won't remember is that every week Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? pitted group intelligence against individual intelligence, and that every week, group intelligence won.

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? was a simple show in terms of structure: a contestant was asked multiple-choice questions, which got successively more difficult, and if she answered fifteen questions in a row correctly, she walked away with $1 million. The show's gimmick was that if a contestant got stumped by a question, she could pursue three avenues of assistance. First, she could have two of the four multiple-choice answers removed (so she'd have at least a fifty-fifty shot at the right response). Second, she could place a call to a friend or relative, a person whom, before the show, she had singled out as one of the smartest people she knew, and ask him or her for the answer. And third, she could poll the studio audience, which would immediately cast its votes by computer. Everything we think we know about intelligence suggests that the smart individual would offer the most help. And, in fact, the "experts" did okay, offering the right answer--under pressure--almost 65 percent of the time. But they paled in comparison to the audiences. Those random crowds of people with nothing better to do on a weekday afternoon than sit in a TV studio picked the right answer 91 percent of the time.

Now, the results of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? would never stand up to scientific scrutiny. We don't know how smart the experts were, so we don't know how impressive outperforming them was. And since the experts and the audiences didn't always answer the same questions, it's possible, though not likely, that the audiences were asked easier questions. Even so, it's hard to resist the thought that the success of the Millionaire audience was a modern example of the same phenomenon that Francis Galton caught a glimpse of a century ago.

As it happens, the possibilities of group intelligence, at least when it came to judging questions of fact, were demonstrated by a host of experiments conducted by American sociologists and psychologists between 1920 and the mid-1950s, the heyday of research into group dynamics. Although in general, as we'll see, the bigger the crowd the better, the groups in most of these early

experiments--which for some reason remained relatively unknown outside of academia--were relatively small. Yet they nonetheless performed very well. The Columbia sociologist Hazel Knight kicked things off with a series of studies in the early 1920s, the first of which had the virtue of simplicity. In that study Knight asked the students in her class to estimate the room's temperature, and then took a simple average of the estimates. The group guessed 72.4 degrees, while the actual temperature was 72 degrees. This was not, to be sure, the most auspicious beginning, since classroom temperatures are so stable that it's hard to imagine a class's estimate being too far off base. But in the years that followed, far more convincing evidence emerged, as students and soldiers across America were subjected to a barrage of puzzles, intelligence tests, and word games. The sociologist Kate H. Gordon asked two hundred students to rank items by weight, and found that the group's "estimate" was 94 percent accurate, which was better than all but five of the individual guesses. In another experiment students were asked to look at ten piles of buckshot--each a slightly different size than the

Customer Reviews:

Smart, Interesting and Easy to Read.......2007-09-21

This book was a surprise hit for me. I didn't expect to like it, but ended up loving it so much I just had to have a copy on my shelf. Surowieki is very convincing, in part because he takes such care to bring up alternative arguments and respond to each. He also keeps his focus fairly narrow, so the arguments aren't all over the place. I was especially fascinated by his discussion of experts. We rely on them so heavily these days, but now I know to question their expertise. This book has changed the way that I make decisions and the way I evaluate good decision-making in my elected representatives. I recommend this book to anyone interested in making good decisions. It is a smoothly-written book and you won't have any trouble following the arguments or staying 'into' it.

Don't expect a textbook.......2007-09-19

I really like the Wisdom of Crowds because Surowiecki succeeds in explaining complicated and sophisticated ideas in ways that educated people can not only grasp but also incorporate into their own thinking. This is quite an achievement, one that critics of the book have overlooked. This topic has not been open until now to such a wide audience.

Surowiecki never shies from even difficult and abstract statistical concepts. He draws liberally upon academic journals and scholarly books, writing in a style that is at once journalistic and educated.

Yet, Surowiecki never talks down to his reader. Instead he invites the reader to accompany him through an arcane (and dimly lit) maze of statistical practice as it has been developed and utilized for decades by social scientists and economists. The reader is rewarded again and again because Surowiecki points to a partially hidden jewel, holds it up for examination, hands it to the reader and then leaves it in plain sight (often for reference later in the book).

Thus, this book is a remarkable example, a model, for readers (and writers) who wish to bridge the gaps between educated professionals.

My criticism is along different lines. In this extremely visual era, the editors could have widened the audience for the Wisdom of Crowds much further if suitable images could have been commissioned to throw additional light on Surowiecki's prose. But, paper and ink are so much more expensive than artists these days, one can understand the limitations and constraints Doubleday (Random House) were under. On the other hand, why not put up a web site?

Crowds Oh Wisdom.......2007-09-19

Good book and I thought the pace moved along extremely well. There are some significant things in the book that are a bit dated, but overall this is a very interesting book. I also recommend "Beyond Buzz: The Next Generation of Word-of-Mouth Marketing" by Lois Kelly published 2007 to couple with this book. Beyond Buzz: The Next Generation of Word-of-Mouth Marketing

Food for thought.......2007-08-21

I found this book full of sweeping claims, generalizations and is confusing in its presentation. However it made me think. Overall the writer is saying that people independently working on a problem can in a fair vote be more accurate then the smartest individual. He then quotes examples for such behaviour and examples of when the crowds got it wrong when they acted not independently but in mass. I suspect that much of his arguments are sound.

How much I am not sure for example if I asked the average person independently if they believe there was much truth in astrology, I am sure that over 50% would say yes.

However since the book is making much comments, I hope to see some better studies coming forward.

Having said all this it has changed my views on decision making and how to do it.

Surowiecki is a gifted teacher.......2007-08-08

At first I was afraid that "The wisdom of crowds" was going to be a 250 page restatement of the law of large numbers for dummies. In the beginning it looks that way, because Surowiecki takes a lot of time to explain that the more people trying to guess the solution to a problem, each adding their own bit of information, the more accurate the average guess. Not very revolutionary at all (although possibly counterintuitive at first). But as the book moved on I got more and drawn in and impressed by the presentation, which is rigorous and supremely readable at the same time.
The book describes how crowds can solve problems of cognition, coordination and cooperation. It gives the conditions under which crowds are good and not good at doing so. The author illustrates with a myriad of interesting problems and case studies, some rather obvious choices (why do investment bubbles emerge?, why do political stock markets predict so well?), others more arcane (why did the gangsters in reservoir dogs fail?, why is it often easy to cut a line?). What binds these studies together is the way groups handle information and the good and bad institution designed to make them do so.
Throughout all the diversity, it is the great scholarship of Surowiecki that makes everything naturally fall into place. Being familiar with a lot of the material in academic form, I know how conceptually daring some of it is, but Surowiecki effortlessly reduces it to bite-size portions, without compromising much or exaggerating anywhere. Great reading!

Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction

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A Great Work!
Important
Review of McCraw's book on Schumpeter
BEST WRITTEN RECENT BIOGRAPHY; BUT TENOUS WHEN IT MOVES FROM HISTORY TO ECONOMICS
The Basic Paradox of Capitalism

Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction
Thomas K. McCraw
Manufacturer: Belknap Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Book Description

Listen to a short interview with Thomas McCraw
Host: Chris Gondek | Producer: Heron & Crane

Pan Am, Gimbel's, Pullman, Douglas Aircraft, Digital Equipment Corporation, British Leyland--all once as strong as dinosaurs, all now just as extinct. Destruction of businesses, fortunes, products, and careers is the price of progress toward a better material life. No one understood this bedrock economic principle better than Joseph A. Schumpeter. "Creative destruction," he said, is the driving force of capitalism.

Described by John Kenneth Galbraith as "the most sophisticated conservative" of the twentieth century, Schumpeter made his mark as the prophet of incessant change. His vision was stark: Nearly all businesses fail, victims of innovation by their competitors. Businesspeople ignore this lesson at their peril--to survive, they must be entrepreneurial and think strategically. Yet in Schumpeter's view, the general prosperity produced by the "capitalist engine" far outweighs the wreckage it leaves behind.

During a tumultuous life spanning two world wars, the Great Depression, and the early Cold War, Schumpeter reinvented himself many times. From boy wonder in turn-of-the-century Vienna to captivating Harvard professor, he was stalked by tragedy and haunted by the specter of his rival, John Maynard Keynes. By 1983--the centennial of the birth of both men--Forbes christened Schumpeter, not Keynes, the best navigator through the turbulent seas of globalization. Time has proved that assessment accurate.

Prophet of Innovation is also the private story of a man rescued repeatedly by women who loved him and put his well-being above their own. Without them, he would likely have perished, so fierce were the conflicts between his reason and his emotions. Drawing on all of Schumpeter's writings, including many intimate diaries and letters never before used, this biography paints the full portrait of a magnetic figure who aspired to become the world's greatest economist, lover, and horseman--and admitted to failure only with the horses.

Customer Reviews:

A Great Work!.......2007-10-08

Schumpeter was an unusual man: both professionally and personally. This excellent biography captures both. Schumpeter sought fame, and the agonies he went through to achieve this obsession- mainly through the enormous amount of writing and research he undertook, which probably undermined his health and shortened his life- are well captured in this book.

Schumpeter sought to develop a 'system' of economics, yet his prolific reading and research lead him to discover that there is no such thing as a watertight system of economic theory. In fact, Schumpeter found, like most notable economists, that an understanding of economics comes from an understanding of history, psychology, sociology and many other areas of learning. And what a contrast to the emphasis of graduate economics courses taught in our schools today!

Having just read Greenspan's book, it comes as no surprise that Greenspan achnowleged Schumpeter as one of the greatest influences upon his outlook. Both men believe in the superiority of the capitalist system as a creator of wealth, yet not for any doctriare reasons, but because they are/were convinced that capitalism is part and parcel of the make up of humankind, and the way in which we organize themselves and cooperate to ensure our survival and progress.

Buy this book, and enjoy the read; you will find yourself coming back to it to reread sections over again.

Important.......2007-06-23

Free markets are hard to explain. It is even harder to explain why companies must fail and be replaced by new ones. In the U.S. we mostly let that happen but in Europe they try and prevent it. It seems that this issue will become even more important as the world becomes 100% "flat" and competition becomes more intense. Developments in Asia will make the levels of creative destruction we have seen in the past look mild by comparison.

This book gives a great introduction to one of the great economic minds. His insights, although proven over and over, are still not accepted my many.

Review of McCraw's book on Schumpeter.......2007-05-31

I have been impressed by this book, which is a good mix of the 'history' of Joseph Schumpeter and his ideas and contributions to economics. I think the author has obtained a very good balance between trying to understand this great economist, and presenting his work to the informed lay-person. Economists and non-economists alike will find a lot here, which is very relevant to today (perhaps even more so to economists working in academia!). Some of Schumpeter's major works (like Business Cycles published in 1939) are not easy to digest; but this book brings out enough to capture the essentials. Overall, this is the best book on Schumpeter I have seen.

BEST WRITTEN RECENT BIOGRAPHY; BUT TENOUS WHEN IT MOVES FROM HISTORY TO ECONOMICS.......2007-05-01

Thomas McCraw is one of the best business historians in the world and with this output, late in his career (he is an emeritus professor at Harvard now), he can lay claim to being one of the best historians in the world, not just a business historian. It is hard to imagine a political biography in recent years that comes close to matching the lucid style, perfect prose, excellent quotes and commentary about life as this book.

The subject is one of the most famous economists of the twentieth century, someone who along with Frederick Hayek, Ludwig Mises and others from the Austrian School came to anchor the philosophical basis for the success of economic and political freedom. The book covers in detail the personal life of Schumpeter, including a lot of material not commonly available. His biography of the deaths of his daughter mother and wife within months is an excellent if tragic basis to delineate the first part of Schumpeter's life, which the author suggests made him an Enfant Terrible, from the second, which the author calls made him an adult. The final segment is his becoming a Sage. Peppered throughout the book are some of the best quotations from some of the most famous persons in history, including legendary poets, yet ones the reader would never have read before.

For all those reasons, Thomas McCraw has delivered a book that is filling like a all-you-can-eat buffet, yet with each dish of the same quality as fine dining. IT IS A TOUR DE FORCE.

Yet there is a contextual flaw which weighs down the narrative. From the very first pages it is clear that Thomas McCraw is attempting to also make a comparative evaluation of economic systems, a task that quickly appears tenous, and to do that while crowning Schumpeter as the king of economics, past and present, at which point the narrative makes one cringe. Here is why this brilliant history turns into tenous economic analysis.

Firstly, as Thomas McCraw's colleagues across the Charles River should tell him, Schumpeter was his best not so much as a pure AUstrian-School economist but as a chronicler of the economy, almost a contemporary historian of the subject. In that sense he shared much with Karl Marx, who he studied extensively, for both really shined with words not with mathematics. So the author's repeated references to Schumpeter as a mathematical genius, or as a competitor in that regard with John Keynes, fails and fails obviously. Schumpeter was the least mathematical of all the great economists of the twentieth century.

Secondly, McCraw makes the error common to passionate biographers to make a sage out of their subject. Here too the book overreaches, for Schumpeter was among the worst at foretelling the future. Here again it was because he was more a historian, and less an economist. He predicted capitalism would collapse, a prediction that the author just glosses over. Yet the author pillories Karl Marx for the same error without realizing that Karl Marx wrote without the full benefit of the technological revolution, the telegraph and railroad barely underway by the 1840s. Yet by Schumpeter's time, not only were those revolutions done, but so was the telephone, electricity, the internal combustion engine and the airplane. As such, Schumpeter's pessimism was unforgivable while Karl Marx's was fully understandable.

Third, McCraw makes a shocking mistake by glossing over Schumpeter's lobbying for heavy reparations on the Germans after WW I. He did so by offering calculations that the German economy would easily recover, and therefore could support reparations. The point was fully opposed by John Keynes, who resigned as representative of Britain when the Schumpeterian perspective was used to devastate the Germans with debt burdens. If McCraw had not been at Harvard, or of such fame, it would easily have been a career ending mistake. After all, it is well known that those reparations led to Adolf Hitler and WW II, a point so well understood by 1945 that John Keynes was made the head of the entire postwar economic decisionmaking, precisely why he got to build the World Bank, IMF and Bretton Woods. Schumpeter by contrast was thoroughly discredited.

Fourth, for a business historian of unmatched credibility, McCraw makes a surprising contextual error with regard to Schumpeter's life. He seems to ignore the inevitability of progress, of the drivers of American growth in the early 20th century and absolute irrelevance of Schumpeter to that growth. Perhaps it is his bias as a biographer, or to make the layman buy the book, but it is fatal to the book. Here again, I point to the prior point that Schumpeter was more an economic historian than an economist in the sense that HAD SCHUMPETER NOT LIVED, NONE OF THE GREAT ECONOMIC ADVANCES OF THE 20TH CENTURY, INCLUDING THE VENTURE CAPITAL BUSINESS, WOULD HAVE BEEN HAMPERED. By contrast, without John Keynes, recovery after Sept. 11th, after WW II (when defense spending collapsed and social spending and reconstruction was increased to avoid a collapse of the economy) or in the midst of the Great Depression would have been hard to imagine. Precisely why comparative economic analysis undertaken by McCraw takes the tinge of conservative talk show simplicity. Harvard's economics department would likely have little of his business history about Schumpeter.

Finally, the book would have been a lot stronger had it left the idolization of Schumpeter to the jacket flaps and in the introduction. But repeated compliments only make the reader notice that the author has it wrong, especially when he summarily dismisses karl Marx or John Keynes the way a conservative talk show host would. All Schumpeter was was an immensely readable subject, and an inspiring prosaists who hungered for fame, and whose economic history was impressive, all reasons why you must buy the book and keep it prominently on your book shelf, but he was a flawed economist driven to the wrong conclusions (from reparations to the sustainability of capitalism). His grandiosity was Churchillian, as was his sense of history and society, but unlike Winston Churchill, fate never gave Schumpeter the chance to correct for a lifetime of grandiose errors.

The Basic Paradox of Capitalism.......2007-04-24

As I recently read Thomas K. McCraw's brilliant biography of Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950), I was intrigued by the evolution of his career after he earned a Ph.D. at the University of Vienna (1906). At age 24, he served as a secretary of state for finance in the new Austrian republic (1919-1920), and later became chairman and president of a Vienna-based Biederman Bank (1920-1924) that collapsed. As a result of that and several substantial investments in companies which also failed, Schumpeter suffered major financial setbacks (both professional and personal) but eventually repaid his debts, then taught at the University of Bonn (1925-1932) before accepting an offer to join the Harvard faculty as a professor of economics where he continued to teach until his death in 1950. McCraw also examines Schumpeter's personal life that, understandably, reflected the successes and failures in his career. For example, Schumpeter fell deeply in love with Anna Josifina Reisinger and married her in 1925. The next year, his beloved mother died and within a month, his wife died in childbirth, as did their son. McCraw suggests that Schumpeter never fully recovered from these personal losses.

Of greatest interest to me is the context or frame-of-reference the biographical material provides for one of Schumpeter's most influential business concepts, "creative destruction," which he introduced in his most popular book, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy," first published in 1942. Scholars have divided opinions as to the influences on Schumpeter's development of this concept. They probably include Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Werner Sombart.

According to Schumpeter, there is a "process of industrial mutation-if I may use that biological term-that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in." He goes on to explain, "The first thing to go is the traditional conception of the modus operandi of competition. Economists are at long last emerging from the stage in which price competition was all they saw. As soon as quality competition and sales effort are admitted into the sacred precincts of theory, the price variable is ousted from its dominant position. However, it is still competition within a rigid pattern of invariant conditions, methods of production and forms of industrial organization in particular, that practically monopolizes attention. But in capitalist reality as distinguished from its textbook picture, it is not that kind of competition which counts but the competition from the new commodity, the new technology, the new source of supply, the new type of organization (the largest-scale unit of control for instance) - competition which commands a decisive cost or quality advantage and which strikes not at the margins of the profits and the outputs of the existing firms but at their foundations and their very lives." (from "The Process of Creative Destruction," 1942) There are countless examples of applications of this concept, notably Jack Welch's determination to "blow up" GE after he succeeded Reginald Jones as CEO.

In his own review of Prophet of Innovation in the Wall Street Journal, Dan Seligman includes Schumpeter's widely quoted question-and-answer sequence: "Can capitalism survive? No, I do not think it can." Seligman then suggests that that answer "is hedged in later passages [in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy]. Even so, it will seem wildly counterintuitive to readers who have read Schumpeter on capitalism's huge successes." I agree. In fact, I presume to suggest that, from Schumpeter's perspective, no form of capitalism can survive and that continuous replacement of one form of capitalism by another confirms the enduring reality of creative destruction. Without it, there can be no innovation. In essence, that is the basic paradox of capitalism.

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Disgusting! Don't buy this book!
Portrays a realistic view of the world while rising up in power.
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The Art of Seduction
The 33 Strategies of War
Get Anyone to Do Anything: Never Feel Powerless Again--With Psychological Secrets to Control and Influence Every Situation
The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Collins Business Essentials)

ASIN: 0140280197
Release Date: 2000-09-05

Amazon.com

"Learning the game of power requires a certain way of looking at the world, a shifting of perspective," writes Robert Greene. Mastery of one's emotions and the arts of deception and indirection are, he goes on to assert, essential. The 48 laws outlined in this book "have a simple premise: certain actions always increase one's power ... while others decrease it and even ruin us."

The laws cull their principles from many great schemers--and scheming instructors--throughout history, from Sun-Tzu to Talleyrand, from Casanova to con man Yellow Kid Weil. They are straightforward in their amoral simplicity: "Get others to do the work for you, but always take the credit," or "Discover each man's thumbscrew." Each chapter provides examples of the consequences of observance or transgression of the law, along with "keys to power," potential "reversals" (where the converse of the law might also be useful), and a single paragraph cleverly laid out to suggest an image (such as the aforementioned thumbscrew); the margins are filled with illustrative quotations. Practitioners of one-upmanship have been given a new, comprehensive training manual, as up-to-date as it is timeless.

Book Description

Amoral, cunning, ruthless, and instructive, this piercing work distills three thousand years of the history of power in to forty-eight well explicated laws. As attention--grabbing in its design as it is in its content, this bold volume outlines the laws of power in their unvarnished essence, synthesizing the philosophies of Machiavelli, Sun-tzu, Carl von Clausewitz, and other great thinkers. Some laws teach the need for prudence ("Law 1: Never Outshine the Master"), the virtue of stealth ("Law 3: Conceal Your Intentions"), and many demand the total absence of mercy ("Law 15: Crush Your Enemy Totally"), but like it or not, all have applications in real life. Illustrated through the tactics of Queen Elizabeth I, Henry Kissinger, P. T. Barnum, and other famous figures who have wielded--or been victimized by--power, these laws will fascinate any reader interested in gaining, observing, or defending against ultimate control.

Customer Reviews:

Made up stories.......2007-10-12

The book is interesting but most of the stories sound made up to fit the author's point. He even admits in one of the last chapters that when something has happened in the past, you can reinterpret it and insert your own lines (p.397).

VERY USEFUL IF YOU ARE NEW TO A BIG CITY.......2007-10-08

The world as battle-field. It doesn't get any better than this if success is what you're looking for!

Disgusting! Don't buy this book!.......2007-10-06

If you want a guide on how to be manipulative, amoral and corrupt at everyone else's expense...this is for you. As for me, I was disgusted from page one....it goes completely against everything I believe in. "Never put too much trust in friends" ...must be awfully lonely in such a world where you can trust no one. Perhaps that's because you've stabbed everyone in the back. This "looking out for #1" at all costs is what is wrong with the world today. If any book EVER deserved to be burned...this is it!

Portrays a realistic view of the world while rising up in power........2007-09-16

When I first acquired this book, I delved into the text and was fascinated by what is never taught in school, hardly at work, even with people; as this book states wisely, many people would like to keep to themselves and therefore many who have power hardly share it, unless a deal is behind it. The book itself may be a paradox in parts, and the methods used may be controversial; yet it has the essential basic "training" in order to strive to the top.
Sometimes one wonders if this will work, or does this author fool us into purchasing this book. It may show a pessimistic world of beguile, secrecy, envy and greed; however this portrays a realistic view of the world while rising up in power.
Brilliantly written, with worthy examples of great thinkers, philosophers and military officials of history; this concise edition will keep you on the ground reading, whilst teaching you how to propel in the air and on top of the world.

USMC- Commandant's reading list.......2007-07-25

In the interest of full disclosure, I'm Army - 16yrs. From 2000 thru 2006 I was stationed in Okinawa and the best place for all service members to buy books so deployed (Amazon aside) was from the bookstore on Camp Foster (across from the movie theatre). For at least a good 6 months (in 2002) this book was prominently featured on the shelves with a tag identifying it as having made the USMC Commandant's Reading List (or, a book senior commisioned Marine Corps leadership consider beneficial to Marines (enlisted and commisioned) seeking guidance on professional development). Intrigued, I bought it. I won't go into a lengthy review here: in a nutshell; the book lists a series of TTPs (tactics, techniques and procedures) designed to maximize one's advantage when negotiating interpersonal realationships both professional and personal. Some of these TTPs involve elements of manipulation, subterfuge, and dishonesty that clearly cross the boundaries of unethical behavior. It bothered me not just a little that Marines or Soldiers (young and old) might consider using the advice in this book as means of advancing their careers or solidifying leadership positions within their respective units.

I do know some of the book's reccomendations are in direct conflict with The Army Values, and according to at least two USMC Staff NCOs (both good friends) this is also the case regarding their own code of professional conduct. One of the Marines in question wrote a letter (to whom -I don't know) expressing his concern. A few months later the book assumed a less prominent residence on the shelves. Nonetheless; I never failed to see it lodged in the odd bookshelf in someone's (usually an officer) professional space - from time to time. I consider its presence an indicator for stepping up one's vigilance when dealing with the books's owner.

Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics

Average customer rating:

Evolution, a recipe for innovation
Modern Classic
Eye-popping paradigm shift in economics unveiled
Must have for anyone who gave up on economics... like me
A must for economics students!

Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics
Eric D. Beinhocker
Manufacturer: Harvard Business School Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 157851777X

Book Description

In the Origin of Wealth, Eric Beinhocker offers a thorough and convincing new way to think about economic growth and business management. The author begins by exploring the roots of modern economic theory and ultimately declares it outmoded and wrong. Instead, he suggests, markets and growth can best be explained by drawing on the emerging field of complexity economics: the study of markets and social systems as complex adaptive systems. Although biological metaphors in business have become familiar (i.e., organizations are living organisms), Beinhocker moves beyond metaphor to explain the revolutions in science that will inevitably change the way we think about economics, competition, and business. The Origin of Wealth raises important questions such as: How can one create strategy in uncertain and fast moving environments? Why is it hard for large organizations to be innovative and how should we organize for better results? What role should governments play in this new era?

Customer Reviews:

Evolution, a recipe for innovation.......2007-10-14

The author has carried out a tremendous amount of work to study the latest developments in many different fields clustered around the concept of "complexity economics". The two most interesting ideas for me were about innovation and strategy development. I was amazed to learn how you can generate new insights and innovations in products , systems and organisation by computer simulations where "agents" compete in the way the evolution works. That is those features, and organisms, survive that successfully adapt to changes in the environment. These "agents" are simplified computer models of human beings, of a system or of a component. The characteristics of these agents change at random, similar to mutations in evolution. The agents compete in a computer. At the end of a simulation round the best performers engage in "computer sex" leading to new generation of more competent "agents". After many rounds innovations develop "automatically"
The second interesting area is about innovation strategy. Luck remains a factor, but its influence can be reduced by having a portfolio of innovative projects. Microsoft with its Windows strategy is a fascinating example.
The purpose in these simulations is important. On page 280 it says that the goal of a business is making a profit. This is what many people in society at large also think. It is not what the most read management gurus like Peter Drucker, and Jim Collins think. Their view is that profit is a condition for survival and a measure of success. Interestingly on page 411 the first view is corrected where it states that "profitability is not an objective in itself but a fundamental restraint that must be met". The cause of this contradiction may be the almost total absence in the book of the subjects of ethics, values, corporate citizenship and CSR. May be it is difficult to create synthetic "agents" with values other than greed. That should be possible though and would be a very interesting development.

Modern Classic.......2007-09-25

I would classify Eric Beinhocker's book as an instant classic. Although it is more of a survey of broad spectrum of economic studies, it is extremely well put together and well written. I promised myself that this is a book that requires a more detailed review but since I have not had time to write that yet, I want to at least share the following with the would be readers of this book:

Buy this book! The primary focus of the book is analysis of how emergence (no pun intended) of complex dynamical systems is changing the fundamentals of economics. Book does an excellent job of giving historical account of how mathematical foundations of economics was developed and influenced by the math/physics of the time: math of systems in equilibrium. Afterwords it methodically studies the complex dynamical systems, their impact on agent based modeling of complex phenomenon and how this development in mathematical thinking is already impacting economics. Last couple of chapters also provide ponderings of complex dynamical systems analysis and its impact on policy making and international relations.

Book is clearly written, well researched with excellent bibliography and captures some of the most throught provoking research in the industry in a simple and conherent fashion.

If I get time I promise to write a longer and more deserving review of this book.

Eye-popping paradigm shift in economics unveiled.......2007-07-14

On the subject matter...
Ever wonder why macro-economics didn't make sense?
Want to know more about how economies and markets really work?

On the writing...
The author provides a simple, compelling narrative which debunks a large portion of economics as it has been taught for the last 200 years. It then goes on to synthesize broad swaths of recent economic research into a cohesive vision of economics as an evolutionary open system and that observable macro-economic patterns are largely a product of the evolutionary algorithm at work.

If a high level understanding of the workings of economies or markets is of interest to you -- or you just want to unlearn a lot of false theory -- The Origin of Wealth is for you!

Must have for anyone who gave up on economics... like me.......2007-07-02

If you ever tried to read a book on economics, you probably loved the classics (Adam Smith, Shumpeter, Keynes...) but then you probably had an uneasy feeling about people trying to use some kind of Maxwell equation to explain the workings of the economy. That's where you probably decided that this science was either too complex for you (in fact, it is the world that is too complex for traditional economics) or that scholars were probably more interested in masturbating their brains than truly explaining the world. That's usually where a science needs a paradigm shift in order to stay alive in the world, and not just in academia.

Hopefully, things have changed and economists are now introducing concepts that gracefully embrace the nature of the subject : evolution, non-linear functions, psychology, sociology, and intelligent mathematics (the one that tries to fit with the actual world, not the opposite)

This book is a must have... The kind of book that makes you feel intelligent not because it's full of obscure concepts that you think you can loosely fit together, but because it is fact-based, well written, sometimes surprising, and most of all it feels right... which is truly groundbreaking.

Just like in nuclear physics, this science finally takes off the very moment it stops trying to fit the world in an a+b=c equation. Instead of having a precisely wrong theory, we now have something that accounts for the inherent complexity of the economy and unveils new and fascinating territories for us to discover.

A must for economics students!.......2007-07-01

I am an undergraduate student of economics and was always critical about the Traditional Economics theories that were presented in class. I never just accepted the textbook's mathmatical models as the ultimate truth and always looked for more. I read books from a wide range of areas, all supporting my view that there was something more to our economic life than what professors told us in class, but never making a clear connection to economic theory. I bought this book by chance before a long flight and can't say how happy I was when I realized what Beinhocker was saying. I could not stop reading and finished it in about a week. Beinhocker showed me how to break through the mathmatical barriers of traditional economics and think about economics in an exiting and liberating new way. His introduction to Complexity Economics (as he calls it) has given me new hope for economics and enthusiasm for my studies. I am already diving deeper and deeper into work mentioned in the references and a whole new world is opening in front of me! A. J. Sutter makes many valid points in his lengthy review above. I still think Beinhocker managed to write a book that is groundbreaking in its range of topics covered and its comprehensive overview of Complexity Economics.
No student of economics who has not at least heard about the topics mentioned in this book can say that he knows the subject he is studying.

Average customer rating:

Capital Ideas Evolving
Ludicrous
Accessible explanation of the foundations of finance
Unique and sunsurpassed.
An excellent book

Capital Ideas Evolving
Peter L. Bernstein
Manufacturer: Wiley
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World
Inside the House of Money: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Profiting in the Global Markets

ASIN: 0471731730

Book Description

"A lot has happened in the financial markets since 1992, when Peter Bernstein wrote his seminal Capital Ideas. Happily, Peter has taken up his facile pen again to describe these changes, a virtual revolution in the practice of investing that relies heavily on complex mathematics, derivatives, hedging, and hyperactive trading. This fine and eminently readable book is unlikely to be surpassed as the definitive chronicle of a truly historic era."
- John C. Bogle, founder of The Vanguard Group and author, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing

"Just as Dante could not have understood or survived the perils of the Inferno without Virgil to guide him, investors today need Peter Bernstein to help find their way across dark and shifting ground. No one alive understands Wall Street's intellectual history better, and that makes Bernstein our best and wisest guide to the future. He is the only person who could have written this book; thank goodness he did."
- Jason Zweig, Investing Columnist, Money magazine

"Another must-read from Peter Bernstein! This well-written and thought-provoking book provides valuable insights on how key finance theories have evolved from their ivory tower formulation to profitable application by portfolio managers. This book will certainly be read with keen interest by, and undoubtedly influence, a wide range of participants in international finance."
- Dr. Mohamed A. El-Erian, President and CEO of Harvard Management Company, Deputy Treasurer of Harvard University, and member of the faculty of the Harvard Business School

"Reading Capital Ideas Evolving is an experience not to be missed. Peter Bernstein's knowledge of the principal characters-the giants in the development of investment theory and practice-brings this subject to life."
- Linda B. Strumpf, Vice President and Chief Investment Officer, The Ford Foundation

"With great clarity, Peter Bernstein introduces us to the insights of investment giants, and explains how they transformed financial theory into portfolio practice. This is not just a tale of money and models; it is a fascinating and contemporary story about people and the power of their ideas."
- Elroy Dimson, BGI Professor of Investment Management, London Business School

"Capital Ideas Evolving provides us with a unique appreciation for the pervasive impact that the theory of modern finance has had on the development of our capital markets. Peter Bernstein once again has produced a masterpiece that is must reading for practitioners, educators and students of finance."
- André F. Perold, Professor of Finance, Harvard Business School

Customer Reviews:

Capital Ideas Evolving.......2007-09-19

This was not an easy read, but it was worth it. I received my MBA in 1976. Much of this book was an explanation of the effects of the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) on current investment practices. He assumes that the reader is well versed with the intricacies of CAPM. I had to go back to other sources to review CAPM, but once I did, the book was a great explanation of how CAPM and other academic innovations have had a practical effect on portfolio management. When I finished the book, I had to admit that I was not able to apply much to my personal portfolio management, but I have a much better understanding of what my pension plan administrator is thinking about as well as what certain mutual funds managers are doing. The book is more beneficial for the professional investor than the individual investor.

Ludicrous.......2007-08-21

Maybe this is a great intro to classic theory, but then there is something wrong with classical thinking.

My one-star rating is for his "forgiveness" of the Long Term Capital Management gang, since no one could have predicted what actually happened.

LTCM managers (inducing Merton and Sholes, subjects of chapters) had excessive confidence in models based on theories that have not been even come close to being validated.

It is ironic that Amazon pairs this book with "The Black Swan" in their "Buy Two" promotion since Bernstein has clearly been "fooled by randomness".

Accessible explanation of the foundations of finance.......2007-08-02

In the early 1950s, graduate student Harry Markowitz presented his Ph.D. dissertation to the University of Chicago economics department. The response was less than encouraging. "This isn't a dissertation in economics," Milton Friedman told Markowitz. "It's not math, it's not economics, it's not even business administration." Whatever it was, Markowitz's heterodox theory of portfolio selection changed finance forever and earned a Nobel Prize. Financial historian and investment manager Peter L. Bernstein humanizes his saga of great shifts in financial theory by organizing it around eminent thinkers (Markowitz, Myron Scholes, Franco Modigliani, Robert Merton, Bill Sharpe and others, if you ever want to look up a finance guru). Deepening his analysis with insights from "behavioral finance," Bernstein describes how these innovators generated and extended the now-orthodox "capital ideas" of portfolio selection, capital structure, the Capital Asset Pricing Model, the efficient market hypothesis and the Black-Scholes-Merton theory of option pricing. Bernstein's erudition is dazzling, his explanations pellucid and his narrative filled with scintillating characters. getAbstract doesn't need to hedge: you'll find this overview of current finance theory and practice brilliant, even if you don't know your alpha from alfalfa.

Unique and sunsurpassed........2007-07-28

I have recommended this and his previous book for finance graduate students at the University of Maryland.

An excellent book.......2007-07-19

This book should be on your book shelf. I would critize the book in that although it recommends against portfolios of individual securities it does not warn the investor against professional portfolio managers.

By way of example:Piscaqua Research in a study covering the period 1987-96 found that only 10 out of 145 major pension funds, or just seven percent, out performed a portfolio consisting of a simple 60%/40% mix of the S&P 500 index and the Lehman Bond index respectively.

Or is it logical I ask for you to believe that you can predict which actively managed funds will out perform, or are you overconfident of your skills? If you are trying to find the great fund managers who will out perform in the future ask yourself: what am I going to do differently in terms of identifying the future winning fund managers, than did the pension plans and their advisors? And if you are not going to something different what logic is there in playing a game at which others with superior resources have consistently failed?

If you a really serious in finding an investment technique that will provide you with reasonable return with less risk I suggest the following little book. This is a little book that I have written and contains the essential of how to invest. Just click on the title to find the book. How to Make Money in the Stock Market-Buy 2,500 Different Stocks-Pay no Commission

The Communist Manifesto (Signet Classics)

Average customer rating:

The Hobo Philosopher
Must have for any wannabe idealist
Political Classic...read for historical insight
A Must Read
A Misleading Edition

The Communist Manifesto (Signet Classics)
Karl Marx , Friedrich Engels , and Martin Malia
Manufacturer: Signet Classics
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0451527100

Amazon.com

"A spectre is haunting Europe," Karl Marx and Frederic Engels wrote in 1848, "the spectre of Communism." This new edition of The Communist Manifesto, commemorating the 150th anniversary of its publication, includes an introduction by renowned historian Eric Hobsbawm which reminds us of the document's continued relevance. Marx and Engels's critique of capitalism and its deleterious effect on all aspects of life, from the increasing rift between the classes to the destruction of the nuclear family, has proven remarkably prescient. Their spectre, manifested in the Manifesto's vivid prose, continues to haunt the capitalist world, lingering as a ghostly apparition even after the collapse of those governments which claimed to be enacting its principles.

Book Description

Critically and textually up-to-date, this new edition of the classic translation (Samuel Moore, 1888) features an introduction and notes by the eminent Marx scholar David McLellan, prefaces written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels subsequent to the original 1848 publication, and corrections
of errors made in earlier versions. Regarded as one of the most influential political tracts ever written, The Communist Manifesto serves as the foundation document of the Marxist movement. This summary of the Marxist vision is an incisive account of the world-view Marx and Engels had evolved during
their hectic intellectual and political collaboration of the previous few years.

Download Description

Still relevant today both as a historical document and as a stirring call for social democracy, this New Albion edition includes Engel's extensive footnotes from the various editions, plus the changing Prefaces written first by Marx and Engels, and later by Engels alone, plus notes on the Manifesto and the various translations of it.

Customer Reviews:

The Hobo Philosopher.......2007-09-14

Well, if you are a student of Philosophy or economics you must make this a part of your reading whether you want to or not. It is not long. It is not difficult. It is quite explicit. And after you read it you should have a better understanding of where you personally stand politically. I am not going to comment on what it says or advocates. Read it and find out for yourself. You won't need an interpreter.

Must have for any wannabe idealist.......2007-09-10

Well, obviously I havent read this fascinating piece of litrerature, but thats because a read book just looks so scruffy on my beautiful capitalist shelves.
This book makes me look a lot more sympathetic to all those wannabe commies, so why not dish out on a copy too?
Nah just joking, just read it and decide for yourself.

Political Classic...read for historical insight.......2007-06-27

My son required a copy of "The Communist Manifesto" for a philosophy class. After he was done with it, I decided to read it since this was one of the founding documents for Communism.

I found it difficult to decide how to rate this book. The presentation of Manifesto by Penguin in this book is excellent. The central ideas of the Manifesto itself are disturbing.

Should you read the Communist Manifesto? Yes. Is this a good presentation? Yes. Was Communism envisioned by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels a good idea? No. So I have compromised between the excellent presentation and the ideas espoused by the Manifesto in selecting an average rating.

Some reviewers feel that the Manifesto's critique of capitalism is right on; I have grave doubts. Marx and Engels were critiquing capitalism from an ivory tower. Their remedies for capitalism show that they had no real experience or contact with the workers in the trenches.

Some reviewers have mentioned the changing of labor laws due to the Manifesto, such as child labor laws (a generally agreed good thing). I believe those laws would have changed if the Manifesto had never been written. I believe those reviewers are seeing cause and effect relationships where there is none. I believe labor leaders in non-Communist states, pushing for change in labor laws, did not need belief in Communism behind them to push for change. Even without Communism, they would have done what they did anyways because the labor leaders came up from the laboring trenches. They knew first hand the abuses going on. The writers of the Manifesto did not; their ideas were theoretical. I know my ideas, in this area, are conjectures of what would have happened without the Manifesto, without Communism; there is no way they can be proven, history cannot be rewritten.

The remedy proposed by Marx and Engels is frightening. It foreshadows exactly how Communism gave birth to totalitarian states, to Communist dictatorships. Their remedy for capitalism requires a select group of leaders (Communist elitists) to force Communism onto the populace for the good of the people. We should all be suspicious of anyone who professes an idea that is for the good of the people because it invariably is not good for the people. To paraphase Lord Acton, "power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely," and the states envisioned by the writers of the Manifesto set up perfect conditions of absolute power (for the good of the people) which in practice led to absolutely corrupt power. History has shown there has been extreme abuse by Communist leaders, who became power meglomanics, of the masses of workers in their states.

Indeed, history has repeatedly shown that the concentration of power in the hands of a select few led to abuse of power. The smaller the select, the greater the abuse. This has been true regardless of the political theories espoused by the leaders. Let this be a cautionary tale to all of us.

A Must Read.......2007-06-23

It amazes me that the effects of cold war propaganda drivel still permeates the minds of most Americans. This is easily one of the most influential works since it's publication in the 19th century. To say something along the lines that the pages should be torn out and used as paper airplanes is like saying the literary masterpieces Dickens should be used as toilet paper. Disagree with it all you want but at least acknowledge it's influence and respect it, as several reviewers have. Don't simply pigeonhole a great work due to the ignorance or American cold war dogma. If you are going to rant about this work at least get your facts straight. Hitler is not a communist..never was. As a matter of fact he hated communism just as much as most Americans do. Second, recognize communism is an ideal, just a capitalism is may I add, and there never has been a purely communistic state. If you are going to give this work a bad rating at least pretend you have read it. Most of the bad reviews are complete drivel and it is obvious the work has not been read. Give a reason why you do not like the book. Simply saying it sucks is not very insightful. Finally, do not give this a bad review simply because you cannot understand what is being said. If the merit of literary works were based upon how something is being said rather than what is being said Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Milton would not be considered literary geniuses.

A Misleading Edition.......2007-06-14

The following is the composure of the book:
pg. 1-170 Introduction by Translator
pg. 170-240 Various Prefaces of Other Editions by the Authors
pg. 240-280 The Manifesto

For those not familiar with Marx, who want to read the introduction and gain new insights--this is a brilliant setup.

For those who would rather just pay $2 for the Manifesto itself--this is disappointing.

Recommended for the student of philosophy, not the professor.

Average customer rating:

unavailable...
A must have
A woman's liberation classic
a room for what?
To get a room of one's own

A Room of One's Own
Virginia Woolf
Manufacturer: Harvest Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Mrs. Dalloway
To the Lighthouse
Orlando: A Biography
Moments of Being
The Waves (Annotated)

ASIN: 0156787334

Amazon.com

Surprisingly, this long essay about society and art and sexism is one of Woolf's most accessible works. Woolf, a major modernist writer and critic, takes us on an erudite yet conversational--and completely entertaining--walk around the history of women in writing, smoothly comparing the architecture of sentences by the likes of William Shakespeare and Jane Austen, all the while lampooning the chauvinistic state of university education in the England of her day. When she concluded that to achieve their full greatness as writers women will need a solid income and a privacy, Woolf pretty much invented modern feminist criticism.

Book Description

Why is it that men, and not women, have always had power, wealth, and fame? Woolf cites the two keys to freedom: fixed income and one’s own room. Foreword by Mary Gordon.

Download Description

" A remarkable work in both the history English literary criticism and feminist theory, Virginia Woolf?

Customer Reviews:

unavailable..........2007-09-09

after i ordered this book, the distributors let me know instantly that they no longer had the book on shelf, and instantly refunded my account. speedy service is one thing, but keeping the customer informed is another...thanks

A must have.......2007-01-03

A timeless essay not only for women. Good hard binding that will keep. It's a must have if you like English literature.

A woman's liberation classic .......2006-05-23

This is a beautifully written and highly enjoyable exploration of the history of women in writing. It is also a plea for the liberation of women, and their full entrance into the world of Literature. Woolf argues that a woman needs financial independence, a room , that is a space of her own, if she is to be able to truly create. She also needs the kind of access to everyday life that women confined to hearth and home were as she sees it, traditionally denied.
She urges that Woman enter into all fields of writing, and develop in directions they had no opportunity to develop in before.
She also perhaps reflecting on her own experience and nature argues for the androgynous nature of the creator, seeing in Shakespeare, Keats and certainly Proust a strong feminine element.
Woolf anticipates and perhaps in some sense helps creates the vast flourishing of Literature written by women which will come in the decades after her.

a room for what?.......2006-03-14

This essay reunites several works from Virginia Woolf about the right of women to possess a place - a room- to read, write and work, intended that not as domestic work as was usual for women during many times.
This book is very good. The problem with it today is many people uses this work only as a vindicating feminist weapon, while few people has truly read it, but remember, Virginia Woolf wanted that room not for itself, but for a finality: to do an intellectual task inside. Some people forgets this fundamental fact.

To get a room of one's own.......2006-02-17

Woolf's argument that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction," holds true not just for fiction but for any activity a woman wants to pursue. The early 20th century essay is still widely relevant, and not just in developing countries.

On the reading style, this essay is much more accessible, compared to say `Mrs. Dalloway' and `To the Lighthouse'. Reading it felt like having a conversation with someone who was not just erudite, but also reflected some of my own thoughts and beliefs. Especially as I believe that economic independence and resource availability could be key to overturning the notions of sexual inequality.

Many thanks to Woolf for airing these thoughts and inspiring the rest of us.

American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21stCentury

Average customer rating:

two out of three
A must read... specially for people that love this country
Well researched and balanced
Sharp, Not Balanced, But An Important Read
One of the Best Books I Have Ever Read

American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21stCentury
Kevin Phillips
Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0143038281

Book Description

An explosive examination of the coalition of forces that threatens the nation, from the bestselling author of American Dynasty

In his two most recent bestselling books, American Dynasty and Wealth and Democracy, Kevin Phillips established himself as a powerful critic of the political and economic forces that rule—and imperil—the United States, tracing the ever more alarming path of the emerging Republican majority's rise to power. Now Phillips takes an uncompromising view of the current age of global overreach, fundamentalist religion, diminishing resources, and ballooning debt under the GOP majority. With an eye to the past and a searing vision of the future, Phillips confirms what too many Americans are still unwilling to admit about the depth of our misgovernment.

Customer Reviews:

two out of three.......2007-10-14

He does an excellent account of the history and current predicament we have regarding our national addiction to oil and lack of a true energy policy because of political weakness, and the incredible national debt to China and Saudi Arabia. But the book stumbles on the concept that "perhaps" one third of the republican voters truly believe the "end times" are near and that the Bush administration heeds this call, such that our nation will be led willingly into more wars to hasten the Second Coming of Christ. Greed for oil, a gamble to create a client state, etc all the real reasons for the Iraq war are cited by Mr Phillips but he seems to not understand the fundamental role of religion in American society - it's never as weak - or as strong - as you may assume.

A must read... specially for people that love this country.......2007-10-08

This book is no hoopla... no gimmicks... no hype.

This book is SUPERBLY well researched... a non-biased objective and insightful look and exposition of the 3 MAJOR historic aspects that shape US goverment policy and that have shaped life in the USA as we know it.

To see where the country is headed... how things are shaping up... and give lights to what needs to be done... one draws our own conclusions, but the facts are there... this book is powerful... this is knowledge that EMPOWERS people... if you care about the USA and it's future, do yourself a favor... and just read this one... republican or democrat, makes no difference... this is just how it is.

Well researched and balanced.......2007-09-16

There is (I think) a growing group of people who call themselves Republicans but are increasingly disgusted with the people who lead the Republican party, and the direction that they take both the party and the nation. I am one of those who has been increasingly disaffected for years, and Kevin Phillips appears to be as well based on his recent writing. I am a long-time fan of Mr. Phillips, as someone who has the courage to see something that he has in the past and still wants to identify with unravel and decline in front of him, and give voice to the frustration, as well as the fear for where this alarming trend might take us.

The book takes the reader through a well-detailed account of how we have reached this point, and where this likely leads. The "here" that Mr. Phillips outlines is a country where the dominant political party in the country has entered into a "great alliance" with the dominant religious organizations in the country in order to maintain joint dominance. The religious organizations benefit by continuing to assure that their agenda's are met by the politicians, while the political party benefits by keeping the eye of the governed off of the rape and pillage that is going on within the political apparatus. The focus weaves this involvement of the extreme right-wing fundamentalist clerics through all aspects of government, focusing in particular on the debt that has resulted and the foreign oil dependence that continues to drive most decisions, plunging the nation further into debt, resulting in increasing profits from those few who "own" that industry.

The historical aspects of the book were excellent, helping the reader to understand how we got where we are, as well as making it clear where history would advise that all nations end up when they get on the path that we have put ourselves on. It is not a comforting picture. I have given the book 4 stars because while the message and content are excellent and timely, I do think that the writing became just a little disjointed and rambled down some alleys at times. I would still highly recommend this book.

Sharp, Not Balanced, But An Important Read .......2007-09-15

Former Republican strategist, Kevin Phillips, believes he knows what is wrong with our nation. Chances are, by very virtue of your reading a book review on a Christian e-zine, you contribute to the erosion of our national health. American Theocracy: The Politics and Peril of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century is at times scathing and at times coolly analytical in its survey of dangers Phillips sees threatening our superpower status.

Part I examines the effects of America's dependency on oil. Our industry, automobiles, and military have an insatiable appetite for oil. Phillips argues that this energy dependency gives Big Oil too much sway over our domestic and foreign policies. At home we lax our environmental laws to accommodate oil drilling. And abroad we resort to international thuggery to secure control of Iraq's mostly untapped oil fields. "The war on terror?", "Importing democracy to the Middle East?" Phillips sees these as slogans to sell an imperialistic war.

In Part II: "Too Many Preachers", Phillips takes aim at Christian Fundamentalism, a movement the he sees embodied by the Southern Baptist Convention, Pentecostals, and the charismatic movements. Phillips chronicles these denominations rise to prominence and how they shape national politics. The culture wars are provoked by radical Christians attempting to establish a theocracy--a Christian America governed by God's rules. "Disenlightenment" is Phillip's descriptor for the effect that these empowered believers have on our country: They value faith over science and a literal Armageddon over peace.

Phillips closes his diatribe with Part III on our national and individual debt. Again, Phillips provides a valuable historic context at how debt played a role in the decline of England, Spain, and the Netherlands as superpowers. Phillips offers an undeniable outline of the depths of our national debt as well as personal credit lodes. He argues that our increasing debt and decreasing hard industry has created a thin ice that will eventual give in under our largesse.

American Theocracy finds its value when Phillips is able to sustain his analytical voice, and he's able to do so for extended periods of time. His historical perspective on our oil dependency, the changing face of American religion, and our national debt demand your attention. I'll confess, as an evangelical with political tendencies a few notches right of centrist, this was uncomfortable stuff to read. Even so, Phillips places important issues on the table.

However when Phillips slips into his polemic voice the book becomes tedious. Phillips has open contempt for people superstitious enough to buy into the Biblical creation account, Noah Arc, or a literal interpretation of Revelation, such as the one popularized by the Left Behind franchise. Phillips also makes too many gaps in his evidence with clauses like, "Although the evidence is weak." He's on a mission to connect the dots and is willing to supply any missing points along the way.

Make no mistake; Kevin Phillips wields too much anger and bias to be objective. But are there any takeaways for the evangelical and fundamentalist Christian communities?

I think so. American Theocracy provokes us to ask several poignant questions:

-- Have we developed what Phillip's calls "American Exceptionalism"; a belief that America has an exclusive blessing from God? How does this belief influence our foreign policy?

-- Does our theology concerning the end times make us overly tolerant of military interventions in the Middle East? ("The faster we get to Armageddon the faster we get to heaven.")

-- Should the political arena our primary method of advancing God's kingdom on Earth? Does Jesus truly expect that we establish an "American Theocracy?"

I won't pretend to offer the final word on these questions. Instead, I just note that in spite of all the book's weaknesses, American Theocracy provides the agenda for an important conversation that's long overdue

One of the Best Books I Have Ever Read.......2007-08-19

I read this book 3 times and have encouraged others to read it. I rarely read any book more than once but this one was so thought provoking. Some reviews stress the chapters about religion but the book is so much more than that. Religion has NOTHING to do with the debt which is dragging this country down which is a chapter all its own. There is also a chapter on consumer debt which is dragging us as individuals and families down. Anyone who is worried about the financial state of this country should read this book.

The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community (BK Currents)

Average customer rating:

Hope Restored
The Great Turning
The Ideal of the Bodhisattva
A "Must Read" for Every Lover of Democracy
A MUST-READ

The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community (BK Currents)
David C Korten
Manufacturer: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

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Globalization | Politics | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

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Evening Thoughts: Reflecting on Earth as Sacred Community
Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming
Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future
The Post Corporate World: Life After Capitalism (BK Currents)

ASIN: 1887208070

Book Description

The threat of continued warfare to the future of humanity has become dire. "The Great Turning explores that threat in detail and provides an equally detailed plan for meeting -- and overcoming -- it. Written in the author's trademark clear, compelling style, this timely book uncovers the roots of Empire in ancient Athens and charts the long transition from the institutions of monarchy to those of the global economy as the favored instruments of imperialism. Korten then discusses the promise of early America as a democracy dedicated to spreading liberty and freedom -- and the failure of the "American experiment" through the contemporary takeover of the U.S. government by corporate plutocrats, religious theocrats, and neoconservative militarists in pursuit of naked imperial ambition. Korten draws on sources as varied as evolution, developmental psychology, and the wisdom of religious mystics to make the case for "Earth Community" -- a people-centered, community-based future that is both possible and necessary.

Customer Reviews:

Hope Restored.......2007-08-07

David Korten has restored my hope that humanity can and will survive the upcoming collision with our own short sighted Hubris. Some, perhaps many of us will make it through and will have restored to us in the process a great deal more of our own compassionate humanity. Well researched, well written. A seminal work! Thank you David!

The Great Turning.......2007-06-12

This book should be read by anyone thinking about how to move toward a fair, just society. Korten talks about levels of maturity leading to understanding that enough people and groups have reached a level where a society based on the principle of community rather than that of domination is within reach. It undercuts struggling with all the forms injustice takes in our present society and considers joining with like-minded groups all over the world to form a bottom-up society concerned with the good of all rather than just looking out for what's good for the most powerful among us.

The Ideal of the Bodhisattva.......2007-05-13

The Great Turning masterfully traces the concept of Empire from pre-history to the present and states that the current world situtation has been shaped by the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of the few. The motivating actions of governments are to preserve their control over the forces of money and power. The democracies of the Western world are not true democracies as they maintain their control over the many by giving prevledge to the few. Korten goes on to relate various pardighms that our culture buys into and which perpetuate the rule of Empire. one of these views is related in the "Imperial Secular Meaning Story."
"Matter is the only reality. the whole of the cosmos is a product of the orderly playing out of physical forces amenable to description and prediction by mathematical equations. Life is the accidental outcome of material complexity. Consciousness and free will are illusions, nothing more. Because life has no intrinsic meaning, the only rational couse of the intelligent individual is to seek material gratification through the accumulation of wealth and power.
The evolution of the living species occurs through a competitive struggle in which the fittest survive and the less fit perish. Mammalian species, naturally organize themselves into heirarchies of dominance for mutual protection and breeding success.
Human progress likewise depends on competitive struggle in which the most fit triumph and those of second rank serve the most fit. the winners prove their superior worth and therby their contribution to the betterment of the whole by virute of their victory. They have a natural right to the rewards of their victory as their just due. Their is no reason for guilt or for concern for those whom the struggle destroys or leaves behind, as their loss is itself proof that they are the less fit. For the betterment of the whole, we must all accept that this their proper fate."
What makes the Great Turning a landmark book is that it exposes these myths for what they are-propaganda for maintaining control with power and wealth. The actions of governments rather than being for the well being of the people are for the maintaining of the myths which concentrate power and wealth in the hands of the few. Korten goes on to forge the strategy for removal of these myths and replacing them with the reality of a sustainable Earth Community.
The human and Divine potential of the sage, writer, artist, scientist cannot be fully realized without the move away from empire to Earth Community. The Bodhisattva's vow while at the threshold of enlightenment takes on the meaning for all of us to work out our daily lives in harmony with the forces that are attempting to bring about an Earth Community.

A "Must Read" for Every Lover of Democracy.......2007-03-08

This is the most important book I have read in years! There is hope. The people can take back America and truly make it a land of freedom, liberty and justice for all.

A MUST-READ.......2007-02-20

This book has changed the way I think about the world and the challenge we face in avoiding "the great unraveling." After reading it, I want to stand up and start making a difference.

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