Matt Taibbi has written an astonishingly scathing review of Thomas Friedman’s new book The World is Flat — here’s an excerpt:

Thomas
Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It’s not that he occasionally screws
up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It’s that he always screws it up. He has
an anti-ear, and it’s absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of
rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary
bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say
some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that’s guaranteed,
every single time. He never misses.

On an ideological level, Friedman’s new book is the worst, most boring
kind of middlebrow horseshit. If its literary peculiarities could somehow be removed from the
equation, The World Is Flat would appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet replete
with the kind of plug-filled, free-trader leg-humping that passes for thought in this country.
It is a tale of a man who walks 10 feet in front of his house armed with a late-model Blackberry and comes
back home five minutes later to gush to his wife that hospitals now use the internet to outsource
the reading of CAT scans. Man flies on planes, observes the wonders of capitalism, says we’re not
in Kansas anymore. (He actually says we’re not in Kansas anymore.) That’s the whole plot right there.
If the underlying message is all that interests you, read no further, because that’s all there is.

If you like the vitriolic review genre, read the whole thing — it’s up there with Taibbi on Newsweek and Anthony Lane on Revenge of the Sith.