The Age of the Unthinkable , Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us and What We Can Do About It [Paperback]

JOSHUA COOPER RAMO (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Hachette (2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316056510
• ISBN-13: 978-0316056519
• ASIN: B00292AYDK
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (77 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,830,889 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Joshua Cooper Ramo is managing director at Kissinger Associates, one of the world's leading geostrategic advisory firms. Before entering the advisory business, Ramo was foreign editor and assistant managing editor of Time magazine. He divides his time between Beijing and New York, and served as China analyst for NBC during the 2008 Olympics. Ramo cochaired the Santa Fe Institute's first working group on Complexity and International Affairs and was a Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute, a founder of the U.S.-China Young Leaders Program, and a Global Leader for Tomorrow of the World Economic Forum. Trained as an economist, he holds degrees from the University of Chicago and New York University

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

188 of 207 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting ideas, but a superficial treatment, April 20, 2009

By 

Irfan A. Alvi (Towson, MD USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us And What We Can Do About It (Hardcover)

Ramo's background is primarily in journalism, and it shows.

On the positive side, Ramo is a good storyteller and he knows how to keep the book lively and engaging. He does it well enough that he can even be convincing, and his not-so-subtle name dropping certainly ties in with that.

But the negative side is that the book seriously lacks rigor. Ramo spends so much time on telling his stories that he fails to clearly lay out his arguments, and it's often not even clear what his key conclusions are. And as far as presenting and responding to opposing points of view, that's not even on the radar.

Ramo also refers to all sorts of ideas from science, history, political science, etc., and this all shows that he's at least reasonably well read, but he usually touches on these ideas rather superficially, using them as analogies at best, rather than as any sort of solid evidence or arguments.

Because of all this fuzziness, I had a hard time distilling Ramo's thesis, but let me try. As I could best glean it, we live in an increasingly rapidy changing and decentralized world, with resulting profound instability which renders it impossible to reliably predict the future in any real detail. To deal with this, we need to be flexible, adaptive, collaborative, creative, structurally resilient, and willing to proactively try things (even if that means risk), in the hope that we can withstand minor shocks and continually nudge the future in a general direction which suits our preferences and broad goals, thereby hopefully avoiding major shocks and catastrophes (especially manmade ones).

If the above summary is reasonably faithful to what Ramo is saying, I do think the thesis has some merit, so we should consider it carefully. But a better book is needed to argue for the thesis more rigorously (and therefore more credibly), to flesh it out, and to spell out its implications more specifically.

Given that I'm lukewarm about the book, I can't recommend it strongly, but I do think that people who are interested in this general topic could get something out of the book (I certainly did). Just don't set your expectations too high if you decide to read it.

54 of 59 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Do You Suffer From Static Cling? No More! Try Mashup!, May 1, 2009

By 

G. Charles Steiner - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us And What We Can Do About It (Hardcover)

This book is very much like the book by National Security Affairs Professor Zachary Shore: "Blunder: Why Smart People Make Bad Decisions," published in 2008. Both books are disquisitions on the need for leaders as well as citizens to exhibit greater creativity given the increased complexity and instability of the world we now live in and both books offer clear, well-written examples either from war history and/or from contemporary life and business illustrating improved modes of thought and perception that go beyond sedentary absolutism or "static cling," the refusal to work with or deal with change so that a more empathic, more resilent, creative and happier, adaptive individual and society emerges.

While Zachary Shore's book is the more didactic in that the lessons he teaches are clearly demarcated and classified by chapter, Joshua Ramo doesn't attempt to lecture the reader directly so much as he tries to persuade the reader with his journalistic war and business stories that certain core ideas such as resiliency, effects-based strategizing, contextual thinking, and mashups (which is literally putting two unrelated items together forcibly to form a new unity) are very much de rigeur today -- if you care about the future of your family and the world. Ramos states that, in a manner of speaking, today, because of technology and increased interconnectedness, we each can be like a Picasso or a Stein and have a huge impact on changing our fragile, rigid culture and political structure.

Interestingly and appealingly, Mr. Ramos likens the chaotic age we now live in with that Cubistic time-period of the early 20th century where Gertrude Stein and Picasso were creative behomeths who knew their place on the contemporary scene as witnesses to the incredible change taking place as the 20th century emerged out of the 19th, whether that change be in regard to war-making, to painting or writing, or to music. Both Gertrude Stein and Picasso took the energy of that transitional period and utilized it for creative expression and mirroring.

I give this book four-stars because the writing is wonderfully and refreshingly clear, frequently entertaining and always conversational throughout -- with no typographical errors anywhere. The book has an energy that seems to resonate with the radical excitement of Stein's prose or Picasso's paintings could we have been freshly on the Paris scene at that time; that is, this is a book that is highly caffeinated yet produces no jitteriness but a pleasant "with it" sensation. Joshua Ramo, however, isn't offering any particularly new or politically radical ideas. The ideas presented here are, however, positively presented and they clearly are ones that offer the best chances to deal with this often very frightening and definitely change-spasmed age we now find ourselves in.

79 of 98 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Eye Opener, March 27, 2009

By 

Robert T. Kesten - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us And What We Can Do About It (Hardcover)

As I read the book I am reminded of all the things I have said to
people over the past 5 years, and thought about and find myself in awe that Joshua has written them down and expanded on it.

I worked in Kiev on the breakup of the USSR and then in the Gulf during
the first Gulf War and was very aware of these issues back then. I
met with members of Congress, our intelligence agencies, even a sitting US president and was dumbstruck by their insistence on maintaining the status quo, even though it signaled failure in the long run.

This is an important book, especially if it gets people talking, acting and at the very least thinking about our changing world.