Flattening Friedman

An example from The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, of Thomas L. Friedman's special descriptive imagery:

And now the icing on the cake, the ubersteroid that makes it all mobile: wireless. Wireless is what allows you to take everything that has been digitized, made virtual and personal, and do it from anywhere.

Friedman's description of the early 90s:

The walls had fallen down and the Windows had opened, making the world much flatter than it had ever been—but the age of seamless global communication had not yet dawned.

And Matt Taibbi's reaction to it in his review published in the New York Press:

How the fuck do you open a window in a fallen wall? More to the point, why would you open a window in a fallen wall? Or did the walls somehow fall in such a way that they left the windows floating in place to be opened?

Four hundred and 73 pages of this, folks. Is there no God?

Looks like another case, where the review is much better reading than the book. Do read the entire review.

Link via Jabberwock.