As the Foreign Affairs columnist for The New York Times, Thomas L. Friedman has traveled the globe, interviewing people from all walks of contemporary life: Brazilian peasants in the Amazon rain forest, new entrepreneurs in Indonesia, Islamic students in Teheran, and the financial wizards on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley. Friedman has drawn on his years on the road to produce an engrossing and original look at globalization. Globalization is the international system that replaced the Cold War system. Globalization is the integration of capital, technology, and information across national borders that is creating a single global market and, to some degree, a global village. With vivid stories, Friedman offers readers of The Lexus and the Olive Tree with access to his unique understanding of this new world order and clarifies how to see this new system. He dramatizes the conflict of “the Lexus and the olive tree” – the tension between the globalization system and ancient forces of culture, geography, tradition, and community. He details the powerful backlash that globalization produces among those who feel brutalized by it, and he spells out what we all need to do to keep the system in balance. The Lexus and the Olive Tree is a comprehensive look at the new world of globalization, the international system that, more than anything else, is shaping world affairs today. This book is essential reading for those who care about how the world really works.