September 22nd, 2011
Galley Hero Andy Ferguson reviews Tom Friedman’s latest:
As a writer, Mr. Friedman is best known for his galloping assaults on Strunk and White’s Rule No. 9: “Do Not Affect a Breezy Manner.” “The World Is Flat” & Co. were cyclones of breeziness, mixing metaphors by the dozens and whipping up slang and clichés and jokey catchphrases of the author’s own invention. (The flattened world was just the beginning.) The breeziness would accelerate into great gusts of rhetoric about “an America we could be . . . an America we once were . . . an America we can be again,” as though the author were poking fun at a slightly drunk Ted Sorensen.
In “That Used to Be Us,” the method has been slightly altered. It would be going too far to describe the writing as “subdued,” but its relative readability marks a break with its predecessors. How to explain it? My guess is that we can thank Mr. Friedman’s co-author, Michael Mandelbaum. A close friend of Mr. Friedman, he is the author of many normal, un-Friedmanlike books, including “The Meaning of Sports.” (“Delightful”—Thomas L. Friedman, the New York Times.)
And that’s the nice part.
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As always, I bow down. This is gold: “The slovenliness of our language, George Orwell wrote, makes it easier to have foolish thoughts, and while Mr. Friedman’s language has been tidied up a bit, the thinking remains what it has always been.”
Galley Wife September 22, 2011 at 10:52 am
P.S., in case you hadn’t heard: “The time for hand-wringing is over,” [President Obama] declared. “The time for moping around is over. We’ve got to kick off our bedroom slippers and put on our marching shoes. We’ve got to get to work.” — September 14, 2011