Warning. This is quite delicious: "These intellectual tensions are not the only flaws in “Hot, Flat, and Crowded.” Scholarly types will doubtless find the first-person examples excessive: they will surely want to remind Friedman that the plural of “anecdote” is not “data.” General readers, too, may wish for a slightly leaner manuscript, lighter on complex technical detail, which can be overwhelming. Some of the inter­viewee quotations are either too baggy or too dense, as if Friedman has moved large sections of transcript into his text. The writing style, with constant new coinages and shorthand phrases — “I call this the ‘Naked Gun 2 1/2 rule’ ” — while winning in a column, can grate over the distance of a book. Whole sentences are repeated or italicized for emphasis, in the style of a spoken lecture. And there are some horribly mixed metaphors: “The demise of the Soviet Union and its iron curtain was like the elimination of a huge physical and political roadblock on the global economic playing field.”"