To be sure, I should insert a “to be sure” paragraph here. The book still bears the unmistakable stamp of the stylist who has become famous for such sentences as: “The first rule of holes is when you’re in one, stop digging. When you’re in three, bring a lot of shovels.” Mr. Mandelbaum’s staying hand falters at times, and suddenly we are being pelted with clumps of words that Thomas L. Friedman, alone among native English speakers, could have devised…

Mr. Friedman can turn a phrase into cliché faster than any Madison Avenue jingle writer. He announces that “America declared war on math and physics.” Three paragraphs later, we learn that we’re “waging war on math and physics.” Three sentences later: “We went to war against math and physics.” And onto the next page: “We need a systemic response to both our math and physics challenges, not a war on both.” Three sentences later: We must “reverse the damage we have done by making war on both math and physics,” because, we learn two sentences later, soon the war on terror “won’t seem nearly as important as the wars we waged against physics and math.” He must think we’re idiots.

The slovenliness of our language, George Orwell wrote, makes it easier to have foolish thoughts, and while Mr. Friedman’s language has been tidied up a bit, the thinking remains what it has always been.