Sarah chastised me for putting aside Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell in order to re-read the Harry Potter series. It isn’t that I wasn’t enjoying the book — on the contrary, I was enjoying it quite a lot. However, ever since I finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows this summer, I have been wanting to re-read the series from start to finish just to see what interesting connections I could make. Therefore, while you won’t see Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell in my current reading list, it’s just been put on hold on my nightstand, as has The Great Mortality. I will be reading Thomas L. Friedman’s The World is Flat as part of a professional learning course, so look for my thoughts and a review soon.
3 thoughts on “Reading Update”
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Two books to read, which offer a counterperspective to Friedman's "The World is Flat."
The Harvard Professor, Pankaj Ghemawat's latest book, "Redefining Global Strategy". I read an article of his published in the journal, "Foreign Policy", where he argues that the world is, at best, only semi-globalized. His argument being that Cultural, Administrative, Geographic and Economic aspects of a nation come in the way of total globalization from taking place and cites examples of the same.
The small interesting book, is by Aronica and Ramdoo, "The World is Flat? A Critical Analysis of Thomas Friedman's New York Times Bestseller." It is a small, interesting book, as compared to the 600 page tome by Friedman. And aimed at the common man and students alike.
You may want to see http://www.mkpress.com/flat
and watch http://www.mkpress.com/flatoverview.html
for an interesting counterperspective on Friedman's
"The World is Flat".
Also a really interesting 6 min wake-up call: Shift Happens! http://www.mkpress.com/ShiftExtreme.html
There is also a companion book listed: Extreme Competition: Innovation and the Great 21st Century Business Reformation
http://www.mkpress.com/extreme http://www.mkpress.com/Extreme11minWMV.html
Readers, I want to point out that Susan Ashcroft, who comments on this blog for the first time here, seems to have made it a mission to debunk Thomas Friedman's book The World is Flat and has frequented quite a few blogs in order to spread the word about the sites and books she has mentioned above. For example:
Productivity CafeJustin Tadlock
Digital Smarts BlogShane Has a Smoking Hot Wife (you will have to scroll down as I couldn't link to her comment)
Global Neighborhoods
I could go on, but there are <a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=rc9&q=%22susan+ashcroft%22%2B%22the+world+is+flat%22&btnG=Search" rel="nofollow">four Google pages worth of it, and you get the idea. It smells fishy to me at best — I'm not sure why such an agenda against this book, but she does at least stand behind her words with a real name and e-mail address. I did not disable the links, though you might want to be careful in following them. I nearly crashed my browser trying to verify whether or not the page she linked to Shift Happens was yet another place you could find <a href="http://thefischbowl.blogspot.com/2006/08/did-you-know.html" rel="nofollow">Karl Fisch's video "Did You Know."
I loved The Great Mortality. It was a quick, easy, and fun read which usually doesn't happen with a lot of non-fiction. Once you get back to it,I hope you enjoy it 🙂