After reading Thomas L. Freidman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree and The World is Flat, I had decided to read Jihad Vs. McWorld by Benjamin R. Barber, Globalization and Its Discontents by Joseph E. Stiglitz and In Defense of Globalization by Jagdish Bhagwati. I meant to read Jihad Vs. McWorld over Christmas break, but never got around to it. Once I started the spring semester with Principles of Sociolgy Honors, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that it would be required reading for the class. I started reading Part I: The New World of McWorld last weekend and will probably finish reading it this weekend. With all the other reading assigned by this and other professors, Part II: The Old World of Jihad may take another week or two. As for the other two books, they’ll have to wait until after summmer school when I take a semester off before transferring to BYU.