For the most part, Thank You for Being Late is a master class in explaining. It canters along at a pace that is quick enough to permit learning without getting bogged down ... yes, the folksiness will still irk some critics...But criticizing Friedman for humanizing and boiling down big topics is like complaining that Mick Jagger used sex to sell songs: It is what he does well ... an honest, cohesive explanation for why the world is the way it is, without miracle cures or scapegoats.
...his ambitious book, while compelling in places, skips about a lot. His attempt to cover much of the history of modern technology, for instance, quickly descends into gee-whiz moments and ubiquitous exclamation points ... While many of Mr. Friedman’s arguments may be sensible, he seems to believe he must claim that a higher power is on his side ... Mr. Friedman ends his inquiry into technology and globalization with by far the best part of the book: an eloquent mini-memoir of growing up in the small town of St. Louis Park, Minn.
...a sprawling book of astonishing topical breadth and apparent conceptual simplicity. Readers will encounter all sorts of interesting content along the way but they may read the overall picture as less coherent and encouraging than Friedman wishes ... The bigger problem, even for sympathetic readers of this humane and empathetic book, is that Thank You for Being Late provides no clear way of unifying its subject ... When Friedman’s story veers from technophilia and retreats from its commitment to labeling every trend an acceleration of an acceleration, it becomes more compelling — but also more discordant.
What gives Friedman’s book a new twist is his belief that upheaval in 2016 is actually far more dramatic than earlier phases ... In two of the most engaging chapters, the author returns to the town and explains how it has created a relatively inclusive, harmonious and pragmatic style of government in recent decades...It is a wonderful sentiment. And it injects a badly needed dose of optimism into the modern debate.
The 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.
None of these accelerations spotted by Friedman are novel discoveries in and of themselves. However, when put together, they work extremely well as an explanatory pitchfork that describes why deep societal unrest has materialized across continents and cultures in the early 21st century ... While he does advocate for our institutions to support people hurt by automated jobs by emphasizing and empowering life-long learning, his blueprint for institutional adaptation is awfully vague ... To argue that all it takes to be successful now is a good idea and a connection to the supernova reeks of Silicon Valley delirium. It also shows that Friedman subscribes (a little bit too much) to the myth that life is a meritocracy, where the most adaptable and hard-working win out.
