Thomas Friedman

Friedman is the author of the book. He is a Middle East correspondent who grows up in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the son of a Jewish family. He first goes to the Middle East as a teenager when his family travels to Tel Aviv to visit his sister in 1968. She is a student at Tel Aviv University. On his return to Minneapolis he works for the Jewish Agency which arranges for him to spend his high school summers at the Kibbutz Hahotrim outside of Haifa. He studies a semester at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and spends a summer studying Arabic at the American University in Cairo. He graduates from Brandeis in 1975, goes on to earn a graduate degree in Middle Eastern studies at Oxford University in 1978 and takes a job at the London bureau of United Press International. He becomes the Beirut correspondent in 1979 and goes to work...