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

Author(s): Thomas L. Friedman

Politics

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.


Product Information

His most ambitious book - part personal odyssey, part commonsense manifesto ... An honest, cohesive explanation for why the world is the way it is, without miracle cures or scapegoats. And that is why everybody should hope this book does very well indeed -- John Micklethwait * The New York Times *

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. -- Gillian Tett * Financial Times *

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.

General Fields

  • : 9780141985756
  • : Penguin UK
  • : Penguin Press
  • : 0.383
  • : October 2017
  • : 198mm X 129mm
  • : May 2017
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Thomas L. Friedman
  • : Paperback
  • : en
  • : 500