Charles Fishman's new book, The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works—and How It's Transforming the American Economy, is the definitive guide to understanding the world's most important company, the role it plays in the social and economic life of the United States, and the far-reaching effects it has on people around the world. Based on meticulous research and written in a dynamic and engaging style, the book is generating rave reviews and widespread media interest. A natural storyteller with a compelling speaking style, Fishman is able to draw out the implications of Wal-Mart's rise to prominence, and apply them to the particular needs, interests and concerns of his audience.

Charles Fishman is one of America's most accomplished journalists. As an award-winning investigative and magazine journalist, he has spent the last 20 years trying to get inside important organizations, from NASA to Wal-Mart, to try and understand and explain them to his audience. Fishman was the first reporter ever permitted inside a Tupperware factory, and he was the first reporter in 30 years allowed inside the nation's only bomb factory. Since 1996, Fishman has been a senior writer at Fast Company magazine. In 2005 he won a Gerald Loeb Award for distinguished business journalism. In 2004 his revelatory Fast Company cover story, "The Wal-Mart You Don't Know," generated the strongest reader response in the history of the magazine, and won best business magazine story of the year from the New York Press Club. His magazine writing has also been in The Best Business Stories of the Year.

Wal-Mart has changed the world of business and the world of shopping with a relentless force never seen before from a single company. But the efficiencies that Wal-Mart insists on, that it imposes, eventually take an unpleasant toll: retail wages are suffocated, manufacturing jobs move from the U.S. to other countries, products once made in factories with reasonable pollution controls and workplace rules end up made in factories that damage the surrounding environment and treat their workers in uncivilized, sometimes appalling, ways. Indeed, the factories and farms would be illegal in this country. Charles Fishman asks, what if you could see a video of the way the products and food you buy at Wal-Mart were produced - would you still be comfortable clothing your children at Wal-Mart or feeding Wal-Mart salmon to your family for dinner? More importantly, what if Wal-Mart took workplace conditions around the world and environmental sustainability as seriously as it takes supply chain efficiency? Could Wal-Mart change
the world, again? For good?