This title has been on the non-fiction Best Seller list for some time.  I must confess that I wondered about it.  I thought it might be some crackpot trying to discredit the "round world" observations of many centuries, even as some now are trying to get us to believe that the astronauts never landed on the moon in 1969.  That was all staged in studio by NASA, they claim.  Well, the best thing to do is to go to the source and find out what it is.  That opportunity came to me when the book was given to me as a gift at Christmas.  The person who gave it said that she wanted me to read it and give her a report on it.  I thought, this must be something!  And it is!

The  title is no hokum.  The book is about the changing world since the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the fall of communism and the Soviet Empire in 1990.  The book is about freedom creeping forward in the world.  It is about market capitalism and market economies burgeoning all over the globe.  It is about technology which is enabling these newly freed people to participate in the global economy as never before.  It is about corporations becoming global as they farm out or "outsource" portions of their business to nations such as India, China, Korea, and others which are developing.  The book focuses on a few large companies and corporations, such as WalMart, UPS, Dell, Microsoft, and others which have become truly global in their outlook and in their operation.  Because of this change in their operation, people in the developing countries are staying home, doing their work electronically and participating in the global economy economically.  These countries are in turn being lifted by the new infusion of capital, wages, etc.  A new, emerging middle class is changing the entire face of India, China, etc.

Thomas L. Friedman, the author, is careful to issue warnings toward the end of the book.  Globalization and the flattening of the world are not inevitable.  The old power structures are not going to lie down without a fight of some kind.  Sickness, illness, opposition, entrenched vested interests, a vertical power structure which will not change, war, and other factors warn people that the globalization which we are now seeing, though hopeful and exciting, faces some very real obstacles in the present and the future.  Friedman claims that globalization and the lifting of previously impoverished nations and peoples can have a salutary effect of lessening the danger of war, if you can get past the power structures and the vested economic, political, and military interests.  He uses as an example one truly global Arab company which is in the process of lifting economically a number of Arab peoples without their slanting off into Islamic fundamentalism such as Al Qaeda promotes.

I have to confess that the message of this book excites me and reminds me that globalization is both a desire and a result of the world wide Christian movement.  Taking a cue from the business, economic, technical world, our desire in Christian missions should be to lift and improve rather than to subjugate and humiliate.  Christian missions should seek to build international community rather than to build empires.  I certainly believe that, and I believe that most of the modern missionary sending agencies and organizations believe that.

It may take you a week or so to plow through the book's 570 plus pages, but I think you will find it a surprising, enlightening, and an encouraging adventure.