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  • Published: 30 October 2017
  • ISBN: 9780241300985
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 496

Thank You for Being Late

An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations




A field guide to the twenty-first century by one of its most celebrated observers

We all sense it - our lives are speeding up at a dizzying rate. Thank You for Being Late 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 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. An extraordinary release of energy is reshaping everything from how we hail a taxi to the fate of nations to our most intimate relationships.

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 and how we can anchor ourselves in the eye of this storm. 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. 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.

  • Published: 30 October 2017
  • ISBN: 9780241300985
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 496

About the author

Thomas L. Friedman

Thomas L. Friedman, the foreign-affairs columnist for The New York Times, is a three-time Pulitzer Prize-winner and the author of From Beirut to Jerusalem (winner of the National Book Award for non-fiction and the Overseas Press Club Award); The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (also winner of the Overseas Press Club Award); Logitudes and Attitutdes: Exploring the World After September 11; and The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century (winner of the first Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award). He lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with his family.

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Praise for Thank You for Being Late

We need Tom Friedman ... a major interpreter of the confusing world we inhabit

Joseph S. Nye Jr, Washington Post

A global star ... given his track record as a zeitgeist thermometer, we should all pay attention

Financial Times

Friedman is a green who's good fun, a scientist who tells stories, a poet whose lyrics are pure logic, a missionary whose zeal doesn't depress you. Phenomenal

Spectator