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Lexus and Olive Tree : Understanding Globalization
by Thomas Friedman

Friedman does an excellent job in bringing the experience and history of globalization to the general public; although Friedman is emphatic in his explanation that globalization is not a phenomemon or a trend. He provides excellent examples of what is occuring in the world in relation to politics and economics. He fully explains the title of the book and how it applies to globalization and the US pace that is set and how it is pertinent to our way of life at this moment. It was an experience to read his book and in doing so, opened my eyes to the placement of the US in the world scheme. I am not an individual that is usually intrigued by politics or economics on the world scale, but Friedman provides the links between events and outcomes of the past several years, that helped me to grasp where the US has been and where we are currently going. This book has been passed around to all my colleagues and business associates. I recommend this edition for those that have read the first edition of Friedman's and encourage those that may be hesitant to involve one's self into this topic, to just read the first chapter before coming to a decision.

The New New Thing : A Silicon Valley Story
by Michael Lewis

Michael Lewis was supposed to be writing about how Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape, was going to turn health care on its ear by launching Healtheon, which would bring the vast majority of the industry's transactions online. So why was he spending so much time on a computerized yacht, each feature installed because, as one technician put it, "someone saw it on Star Trek and wanted one just like it?"
Much of The New New Thing, to be fair, is devoted to the Healtheon story. It's just that Jim Clark doesn't do startups the way most people do. "He had ceased to be a businessman," as Lewis puts it, "and become a conceptual artist." After coming up with the basic idea for Healtheon, securing the initial seed money, and hiring the people to make it happen, Clark concentrated on the building of Hyperion, a sailboat with a 197-foot mast, whose functions are controlled by 25 SGI workstations (a boat that, if he wanted to, Clark could log onto and steer--from anywhere in the world). Keeping up with Clark proves a monumental challenge--"you didn't interact with him," Lewis notes, "so much as hitch a ride on the back of his life"--but one that the author rises to meet with the same frenetic energy and humor of his previous books, Liar's Poker and Trail Fever.
Like those two books, The New New Thing shows how the pursuit of power at its highest levels can lead to the very edges of the surreal, as when Clark tries to fill out an investment profile for a Swiss bank, where he intends to deposit less than .05 percent of his financial assets. When asked to assess his attitude toward financial risk, Clark searches in vain for the category of "people who sought to turn ten million dollars into one billion in a few months" and finally tells the banker, "I think this is for a different ... person." There have been a lot of profiles of Silicon Valley companies and the way they've revamped the economy in the 1990s--The New New Thing is one of the first books fully to depict the sort of man that has made such companies possible. --Ron Hogan
The New York Times Book Review, front-page review, Kurt Andersen, 31 October 1999
[A] splendid, entirely satisfying book, intelligent and fun and revealing and troubling in the correct proportions, resolutely skeptical but not at all cynical, brimming with fabulous scenes as well as sharp analysis....[R]eads, for most of us, like fiction in the best sense, providing character revelation and narrative surprises all along the way....Lewis conveys with a rare combination of wisdom and glee both the thrill and absurdity of late-20th century business.
Wall Street Journal, Fred Moody, 22 October 1999
[R]emarkable....Clark proves to be a character as enthralling as any in American fiction or non-fiction....Lewis tells a great story in this book, with prose that ranges from the beautiful to the witty to the breathtaking.
The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani, 26 October 1999
[Lewis] does for the late 1990s world of techno-geeks and software cowboys what he did in Liar's Poker for the 1980s Wall Street world of traders and arbitrageurs

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