The bestselling author of Balkan Ghosts takes readers on a journey through troubled regions where age-old cultural rivalries threaten to reshape the world of tomorrow. From West Africa to the fundamentalist enclaves of Egypt and Iran to the culturally explosive lands of Central Asia, the people who will remake our world tomorrow are profiled.
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Robert D. Kaplan, author of the acclaimed Balkan Ghosts, travels from the countries of West Africa and the fundamentalist enclaves of Egypt and Iran to the culturally explosive lands of Central Asia, India, Pakistan, and Southeast Asia with hardly more than a notebook and a backpack. The result is an intimate portrait of the devastated parts of the world whose cultural disasters - like those in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Chechnya - will dominate our attention and remake the world of tomorrow.
From Publishers Weekly
After his recent travels through troubled southeastern Europe, Kaplan (Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History) has taken on an even more ambitious itinerary-some of the most inhospitable regions of the globe, both geographically and politically. Starting in West Africa, where he finds that border regions are so porous as to make the concept of countries "largely meaningless," he braves the Egyptian desert, then advances through Turkey, Azerbaijan, Iran, sprawling Turkestan, China and Pakistan and on through Southeast Asia. He advises at the outset that his book "folds international studies into a travelogue." Readers looking for an easy ride had better fasten their seat belts, for the author treats us to all sorts of speculation on the condition of humankind as the century is about to turn, along with generous dollops of history. Intermingled with graphic descriptions of exotic locales are highly personal ruminations, one of the most interesting of which is that in some of these lands, "the village came to the city and . . . vanquished it" by overwhelming modern urban middle-class values. A challenging and engrossing read.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Admiration in despite of "malthusian" pessimism,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the Twenty-first Century (Hardcover)
I want to express my deeper admiration to this work, that I consider extremely clarifying on the situation of the Third World. Perhaps the theory will be excessively "malthusian" and, as such, pessimistic, but when procures be released of that prophetic determinism, Kaplan provides explanations that can not be rejected beforehand . Joaquín Collado (Spain)
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
important book,
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This review is from: The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the Twenty-first Century (Hardcover)
Robert Kaplan writes about his experiences traveling abroad from africa to cambodia discussing things like the region's historys and economies. The book provides an interesting comparision among different improvished regions of the world. Reading this book provides a better understanding of the third world.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A travel guide in the tradition of Dante!,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the Twenty-first Century (Hardcover)
Kaplan leads us along civilizations' San Andreas fault. Here are the places where upheavals, fissures, explosions and social destruction are likley to occur. Kaplan is a travel writer in the same way that Dr. Stranglove is a physics teacher. He sets out to write a travel document that serves as "shock therapy" and succeeds admirably. His analysis of the ethnic stew that is Central Asia is helful to the general reader who wants to understand the political implications of the break-up of the Soviet Union
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