Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Zakaria is a great writer whose produced a highly readable book. Its impossible to go through the pages without feeling a great surge of hope for what the future isabout to bring, courtesy the miracle of free markets. Liberally annotated with anecdotes. The problem is that at the heart of it, this is just more of the Thomas Friedman "Lexus and Olive Tree" rising-tide-lifts-all-boats theory with the same prescriptions so beloved by bipartisan Washington since 1988: more trade, more immigration, more outsourcing. Zakaria's picture omits big pieces of the puzzle: devastated rural America, the loss of those jobs with nothing to replace them: what IS the unemployed American worker supposed to train for? And just who is going to buy all the products that corporations are producing so cheaply in India in China? And what happens when those stellar immigrants (like Zakaria), or more likely, their children, become disaffected Americans and make up the "bitter" folks who live in ghettos - urban or rural - like dying Appalachian towns or the immigrant high rise projects of Bradford or Marseille? Zakaria does try to factor in nationalism, but ignores the human implications of people who are going to lose in his Brave New World. And ultimately, his prescriptions, however entertaining and promising, are ultimately just more of the NYT/WSJ op-ed page.