News & Politics

Tom Friedman, You’re a Lightweight!

Looking at the New York Times columnist's new book compared with other intellectual heavyweights.

Written by Garrett M. Graff | Published on November 2, 2011

Three top Washington thinkers have new books, all much more readable than their physical weight and subject matter suggest. Daniel Yergin engagingly weaves together the economy and the war on terror in a way few historians have done. Thomas L. Friedman, with Michael Mandelbaum, argues that the US is failing to confront the challenges of globalization. Christopher Hitchens returns with about 100 of his best recent essays. Here’s a comparison of these intellectual heavyweights.

	Daniel Yergin, The Quest	Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum, That Used to Be Us	Christopher Hitchens, Arguably	Advantage
Book’s Subtitle	Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World	How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back	Essays	Yergin
Number of Pulitzer Prizes	One	Three (all Friedman’s)	None	Friedman and Mandelbaum
Academic Credentials	Yale and Cambridge University	Friedman: Brandeis and Oxford; Mandelbaum: Yale, Harvard, and Cambridge	Oxford	Friedman and Mandelbaum
Number of Pages	816	400	816	Yergin and Hitchens (tie)
Weight	2.9 pounds	1.3 pounds	2.5 pounds	Yergin
Number of Cover Blurbs	Seven	None	Six	Yergin
Sample Review	“This masterful and illuminating book on one of the most vital issues of our time…should be essential reading for policymakers everywhere.” —Henry Kissinger	“Friedman and Mandelbaum are men of the American elite, and they write to salute those members of the American elite who behave public-spiritedly and to scourge those who do not.” —David Frum	“If Hitchens didn’t exist, we wouldn’t be able to invent him.” —Ian McEwan “Hitchens is the greatest living essayist in the English language.” —Christopher Buckley	Hitchens
Book’s Epigraph	None	“It makes no sense for China to have better rail systems than us, and Singapore having better airports than us. And we just learned that China now has the fastest supercomputer on Earth—that used to be us.” —Barack Obama	“Live all you can: It’s a mistake not to.” —Lambert Strether in Henry James’s The Ambassadors	Friedman and Mandelbaum
Target Audience	Davos attendees	Meet the Press viewers	Slate readers	Yergin