"The consequential age we are living in will be remembered as one of the great turning points in civilization. Once we turn, though, where will we be? That is the compelling question Al Gore sets out to answer by examining the drivers of global change, connecting the dots among the social, economic, and political forces shaping our present and future. A rising global consciousness is forcing people around the world, but especially Americans, to rethink...

In The World Is Flat, the highly-regarded New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman advances the work on globalization that made his The Lexus and the Olive Tree a bestseller. Claiming that the world is now at an important historical point--as important as the changes brought by the discoveries by Columbus or by the Industrial Revolution--Friedman analyzes the events, inventions, and business practices that have resulted in a changed world, one...

Is your salad drizzled with olive oil imported from Italy? What country made the car that your parents drive? Globalization connects us today more than ever before, and in ways we never expected, and populations around the world are questioning whether this is a purely beneficial circumstance or if we should take steps to scale back our interrelatedness. Globalization: Why We Care About Faraway Events delves into the nature and history of interconnected...

"Who Belongs? takes a bracing look at a frequently debated question, as personal as it is political. Rising migration flows, escalating global conflicts, faltering democracies, and polarizing politics have made the question “who is in and who is out?” one of the most urgent issues of our time. With the goal of improving mutual understanding and achieving meaningful shifts in personal and policy-level discussions, the author holds a critical lens...

Nineteenth-century globalization made America exceptional. On the back of European money and immigration, America became an empire with considerable skill at conquest but little experience administering other people's, or its own, affairs, which it preferred to leave to the energies of private enterprise. The nation's resulting state institutions and traditions left America immune to the trends of national development and ever after unable to persuade...

Change is everywhere! Thanks to a global economy, the force of the Internet, and the explosion of mobile technology, we have entered into a new era, the shift age, in which change happens so quickly that it's become the norm.Houle identifies and explains the new forces that will shape our lives for the next 20 years.

Green retraces the history of the global economy and its financial systems and argues that despite its recent lapses, the financial industry is more necessary than ever if business-people will look to their principles before their profit margins. By recognizing the precedence of moral and spiritual values over immediate profit, Green says, we have the opportunity to remake capitalism while also helping the less fortunate and finding meaning in our...

This book makes recommendations for meeting four major challenges currently facing the United States, including globalization, the information technology revolution, chronic deficits, and unbalanced energy consumption. America has a huge problem. It faces four major challenges, on which its future depends, and it is failing to meet them. In this book the authors analyze those challenges, globalization, the revolution in information technology, the...

"There is a vast cultural movement emerging from beyond the Western world. Truly global in its range and allure, it is the biggest challenge yet to Hollywood, McDonald's, and blue jeans. This is a book about these new arbiters of mass culture arising fromthe East-India's Bollywood films, Turkish soap opera, or dizi, and South Korean pop music. Carefully packaging not always secular modernity with traditional values in urbanized settings, they have...

A riveting investigation of the jagged fault line between the Christian and Muslim worlds The tenth parallel-the line of latitude seven hundred miles north of the equator-is a geographical and ideological front line where Christianity and Islam collide. More than half of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims live along the tenth parallel; so do sixty percent of the world's 2 billion Christians. Here, in the buzzing megacities and swarming jungles of Africa...