PositiveThe Washington PostRiveting ... By no means an ideological critique of Fox. Wolff is well aware of the network’s journalistic shortcomings, but the topic does not really interest him; indeed, one of the book’s funnier throughlines is the author’s digressive scorn for other media reporters ... It makes for an entertaining read. Wolff is interested in power and personalities, and in The Fall he offers countless lacerating portraits of the latter, and their variously effective efforts to obtain and deploy the former
Thomas L. Friedman
PanSlateThe world might be fast, but this particular book went by very, very slow ... he likes to distill complicated concepts. He is good at this. I enjoyed the part of the book where Friedman explained how a microchip works; likewise, the section where he described how the effects of climate change have politically destabilized parts of Africa and the Middle East. But too often in Thank You for Being Late, as is Friedman’s wont, distillation becomes oversimplication ... Friedman takes a lot of things at face value. He spends 100 pages furiously stanning for polarizing companies such as Uber and Airbnb ... He raves about 'smart' appliances with the wide-eyed optimism of a man who perhaps has never used one ... Friedman writes in a voice that is simultaneously folksy and ostentatious. He has always written this way, to an extent, but it somehow seems worse than before in Thank You for Being Late, as if his style is devolving, as if he has reached such complacent professional heights that his prose is now cranked out by a Tom Friedman–sentence generator.
