At the start of the 21st century, the West has plunged into crisis. Europe tries to define itself in opposition to America; America increasingly regards Europe as troublesome and irrelevant; and Britain is split down the middle. WhatÂ’s to become of what we used to call "the free world"?
Critic Reviews
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Outstanding
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The New York Times Book Review Serge Schmemenn
Totally engaging.
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Favorable
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Wall Street Journal Francis X. Rocca
European unity is never harder to achieve than in a high-stakes confrontation with America. This is a central insight of Free World.
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Favorable
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New York Review Of Books Tony Judt
Engaging.
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Favorable
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Kirkus Reviews
Ash makes a good case.
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Favorable
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Publishers Weekly
The combination of sweeping historical insight with journalistic immediacy, related in Ash's own conversational style, should help this incisive commentary on world affairs stand apart.
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Favorable
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The Economist
Clear, sensible and well-written.
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Favorable
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The Guardian Chris Patten
So angered does Garton Ash become at the small-minded folly and moral cowardice of much present-day political debate that his cool and witty prose turns into a red-hot, passionate manifesto for free trade, responsible environmentalism, a better deal for the world's poor and a more effective transatlantic partnership to fashion a global open society. He has my vote.
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Favorable
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The Guardian Sunder Katwala
In asserting the importance of those of us in democratic societies seeking to be authors of our own fate, Garton Ash has produced a humane, democratic manifesto for our times. It is worth recalling the lesson of the fall of the Berlin Wall - politics sometimes needs to be the art of the impossible, too.
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Favorable
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The Independent Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
A remarkable response to the British and European identity crises that have emerged so sharply recently.
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Favorable
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The New York Times Richard Bernstein
We owe it to Mr. Garton Ash for speaking what ought to be commonly accepted wisdom but has often gotten lost in the maelstrom. 'Free World is a model of common-sense reasoning based on strong empirical evidence.
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Mixed
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Boston Globe Siddhartha Deb
Garton Ash is conscientious enough to think mass poverty unfair, but he has too much faith in the powerful leaders he has observed so closely.
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Mixed
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Daily Telegraph Charles Moore
So much of this book is so sensible, and all of it is so well written (except that the author does not know the difference between "less" and "fewer") that I was surprised, at the end, to feel a little disappointed.
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Mixed
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The Spectator Jonathan Sumption
It presupposes a uniformity of human sentiment which would make for a world too dull to contemplate. We sometimes forget how much the cultural wealth and diversity of our civilisation have depended on fragmentation, insularity, and even war.
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Unfavorable
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London Review Of Books Slavoj Zizek
In the second half of the book, however, Garton Ash passes to a general diagnosis of the threats to freedom since the end of the Cold War, and the tone becomes dogmatic and simplistic, and the proposed solutions hopelessly naive.
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