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The Ends of the Earth: From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia, a Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy (Vintage Departures)
Books: Travel: Bangkok: Item 7
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The Ends of the Earth: From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia, a Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy (Vintage Departures)by Robert D. Kaplan
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58 of 62 people found the following review helpful: Well-Read Traveler Trumps $30 Billion a Year Spy World, July 12, 2001 Reviewer:Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States) - If you ever wondered why the U.S. Intelligence Community tries so desperately to keep its annual budget secret from Congress and the citizens, this book might provide a clue: one man, very well-grounded in historical and contextual reading, is capable of reporting extremely valuable insights that neither a $30 billion a year spy world nor a $3 billion a year diplomatic community seem capable of either comprehending or communicating to the public. Robert D. Kaplan gets three big things right: he studies history before visiting; he is firmly grounded in a geographical or geophysical appreciation of every situation; and he travels on foot and at the lowest common level. The world he sees and reports on is not the world that the pampered and sheltered diplomats, businessmen, and journalists see or understand. Reading Kaplan is a treat for anyone who takes the rest of the world and America's naivete with some seriousness. He is correct when he posits a new World War, "a protracted struggle between ourselves and the demons of crime, population pressure, environmental degradation, disease, and culture conflict." He is at his best when mixing his historical reading with his personal intellect and observations, to arrive at conclusions that contradict conventional wisdom--for instance, his appreciation of Iran as a structured and stable society, and of Turkey as the next mega-power and the keeper of the Islamic flame. His extremely sharp observations about Saudi Arabia as the hidden enemy of the United States of America are very very provocative, especially when one realizes that we are providing them with an extremely generous military and economic program at U.S. taxpayer expense. Saudi funding of terrorism, including Bin Laden, is increasingly documented in the public domain, and U.S. taxpayers need to begin questioning U.S. policy in this specific area. This personal travel narrative is invaluable as a means of contemplating the realities of nations that exist (e.g. the Kurds) alongside states that continue to persecute and deny these nations a right to live. Although another hundred pages follow, the real end of the book is on page 336 where he discusses a living map of the future world, one that is constantly changing and that reflects several realities--a reality of overlapping group identities such as those of language and economic class; a reality of legal boundaries and overlapping and sometimes conflicting cultural boundaries; a reality of power distributed and often shared openly between police, criminals, terrorists, white-collar thieves, and politicians; and a reality of population growth, disease, refugee migrations and genocide; as well as soil and water scarcity. His bibliography is quite worthwhile, and helps make his personal reporting even more valuable. I have but one disappointment, and that is that this prolific author and policy commentator, a major force (indeed, the only continuous voice on foreign policy matters for The Atlantic Monthly), has failed to provide a concluding section that pulls it all together in an executive briefing suitable for policy consideration. There are many valuable lessons and observations in this book, I recommend it highly, but I fear that the policy-makers who most desperately need to be educated will never, ever actually read the book.
Product Review
"The future here could be sadder than the present," writes Robert Kaplan in a chapter about the African nation of Sierra Leone. From Kaplan's perspective, the same could be said of virtually the entire Third World, which he spends the bulk of this book visiting and describing. Kaplan, an acclaimed foreign correspondent and author of Balkan Ghosts, is congenitally pessimistic about the developmental prospects of West Africa, the Nile Valley, and much of Asia. This traveler's tale offers dire warnings about overpopulation, environmental degradation, and social chaos. We should all hope that Kaplan's forecast is wrong, but we ignore him at our peril.
San Francisco Chronicle
Kaplan is a superb reporter, expertly weaving his precise, vivid observation of facts at hand into a larger context of global social change.
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