Seven Revolutions

In this sobering but optimistic manifesto, development economist Sachs (The End of\nPoverty) argues that the crises facing humanity are daunting-but solutions to them are\nreadily at hand. Sachs focuses on four challenges for the coming decades: heading off\nglobal warming and environmental destruction; stabilizing the world's population;\nending extreme poverty; and breaking the political logjams that hinder global\ncooperation on these issues. The author analyzes economic data, demographic trends\nand climate science to create a lucid, accessible and suitably grim exposition of looming\nproblems, but his forte is elaborating concrete, pragmatic, low-cost remedies complete\nwith benchmarks and budgets. Sachs's entire agenda would cost less than 3% of the\nworld's annual income, and he notes that a mere two days' worth of Pentagon spending\nwould fund a comprehensive anti-malaria program for Africa, saving countless lives.\nForthright government action is the key to avoiding catastrophe, the author contends,\nnot the unilateral, militarized approach to international problems that he claims is\npursued by the Bush administration. Combining trenchant analysis with a resounding\ncall to arms, Sachs's book is an important contribution to the debate over the world's\nfuture. (Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All\nrights reserved.)

Thomas L. Friedman is not so much a futurist, which he is sometimes called, as a\npresentist. His aim in The World Is Flat, as in his earlier, influential Lexus and the Olive\nTree, is not to give you a speculative preview of the wonders that are sure to come in\nyour lifetime, but rather to get you caught up on the wonders that are already here. The\nworld isn't going to be flat, it is flat, which gives Friedman's breathless narrative much\nof its urgency, and which also saves it from the Epcot-style polyester sheen that\nfuturists--the optimistic ones at least--are inevitably prey to. (Reviewed by Tom Nissley)