New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman has a brilliant–and very helpful–ability to identify the patterns at the heart of the most complex world situations, without losing the human voices of the people involved. Over a dozen years after its publication, From Beirut to Jerusalem remains one of the most valuable accounts of Arab-Israeli relations, and in The Lexus and the Olive Tree, he redefined how we thought about the new forces of globalization and the old ties of nation and tradition (and, along the way, introduced the “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention,” which pointed out that no countries that both had a McDonald’s had ever gone to war with each other). Like most of us, he spent the first years of the new millennium focused again on the Middle East, where it seemed as though the main drama of the age was being played out. But a visit to Bangalore, India, in early 2004 made him suddenly aware that the real story was happening on the other side of the globe, as the vast and ambitious populations of India and China began to enter the global marketplace as full-fledged participants, taking advantage of systems of communications, production, and distribution that can connect the entire globe instantaneously. “The world is flat,” he realized, and he immediately knew he had to write about it. In an email and phone exchange between Seattle and the various stops on Friedman’s travels, Amazon.com senior editor Tom Nissley asked him to explain just what has made our world flat, and what that might lead to.

Read more