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An Empire Wilderness : Travels into America's Future (Hardcover)

by Robert D. Kaplan (Author) "WHEREAS EAST COAST monuments such as the Lincoln Memorial and the Statue of Liberty speak specifically to ideals, the Protestant memorial chapel at Fort Leavenworth,..." (more)
Key Phrases: posturban pods, staff ride, United States, Los Angeles, Orange County (more...)

3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (48 customer reviews)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Robert Kaplan has reported from locales as diverse and chaotic as shantytowns in the Ivory Coast, death camps in Cambodia, and the frontlines of the war-ravaged Balkans, but his most challenging assignment may have been covering his own country. In this ambitious and evocative study, Kaplan vividly chronicles his "travels into America's future," a journey that begins in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas--"the starting point for what would one day be called Manifest Destiny"--and continues across the West, where the population is growing faster than anywhere else in the country and multiple American identities reveal a nation in flux. He explores cities such as St. Louis and Omaha, Nebraska, that typify the increased urban fragmentation of the heartland; onward to Tucson, Arizona, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, where great wealth and poverty exist cheek by jowl; through the sprawl of multiethnic Southern California, where the landscape is perched somewhere between urban and suburban; and up through the Pacific Northwest into Canada. He also visits towns along the U.S.-Mexico border, dipping as far south as Mexico City, to investigate the conditions driving so many Mexicans north, despite feverish efforts by the U.S. to keep them out, and the new cultural hybrid being formed by this migration.

Kaplan uncovers a nation polarized along ethnic, economic, and political lines, where the uneven distribution of rapid technological advances allows some groups to surge forward, cultivating a radically different world-view than their poorer, less educated neighbors. Much of his report is bleak, but despite his insistence on documenting the worst, plenty of examples of prosperity and hope appear in these pages. What comes across most clearly is that there is still plenty of room for speculation on exactly how and where the new boundaries will be drawn. In this respect, America's future still carries the promise of the Wild West: equal parts opportunity, possibility, and uncertainty. --Shawn Carkonen

From Publishers Weekly
Having spent more than two decades reporting on ethnic strife and political upheaval in far-flung regions of the world, Kaplan (Balkan Ghosts), turns to his own backyard, trekking across the American West, Mexico and western Canada to map out America's shifting socio-political landscape at the turn of the millennium. The nation, he argues, is losing its identity as one union and splintering, like the Balkanized areas of the globe that have long captivated Kaplan, into a mosaic of different regions with sometimes conflicting cultural identities. In crossing the American Plains and Rocky Mountains, Kaplan sees the growth of city-states and the growing income gap as leading to class-stratified, post-urban pods, in which government does little to improve the living conditions of the poor. The rising Hispanic population in the Southwest has fostered "binational" cities, he says, while the shared interests of America's Pacific Northwest and British Columbia is creating Cascadia, a self-contained region predicated on the eventual breakup of Canada. Kaplan's fluid, razor-sharp travelogue is peppered with references?to Gibbon, the Founding Fathers, ancient Greek and Civil War history?and powerful descriptions of the landscape (a Greyhound bus in New Mexico is "a prison van transporting people from one urban poverty zone to another"; the Arizona desert resembles "the glazed surface of a red earthen jar"; the Pacific Northwest "a magical frontier" of "brooding cathedral-dark forests" and place-names suggesting "an icy clean, mathematical perfection"). As dystopian as it is soberly prescient, Kaplan's vision of 21st-century America will command the attention of readers from all corners of our increasingly decentralized continent. Editor, Jason Epstein; agent, Brandt & Brandt.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

Hardcover: 393 pages
Publisher: Random House; 1st edition (August 18, 1998)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0679451900
ISBN-13: 978-0679451907
Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.7 x 1.4 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds

Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (48 customer reviews)

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,346,768 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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First Sentence:
WHEREAS EAST COAST monuments such as the Lincoln Memorial and the Statue of Liberty speak specifically to ideals, the Protestant memorial chapel at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas-overlooking the Missouri River at the edge of the Great Plains, with the rails of the Union Pacific visible in the distance-invokes blood and soil. Read the first page

Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
posturban pods, staff ride

Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
United States, Los Angeles, Orange County, Great Plains, Fort Leavenworth, Civil War, North America, New York, Pacific Northwest, New Mexico, Third World, Mexico City, British Columbia, Kansas City, East Coast, Johnson County, Union Pacific, Canyon de Chelly, Old World, Latin America, New England, Industrial Age, North Dakota, Boise City, Cold War

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Citations (learn more)

This book cites 100 books:

Decline And Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon on 4 pages
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 3 by Edward Gibbon on 4 pages
The Great Plains by Walter Prescott Webb on page 243, page 244, and Back Matter
The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story (Pivotal Moments in American History) by Elliott West on page 7, page 12, and page 342
Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Revised Edition by Marc Reisner on page 172, page 306, and Back Matter

See all 100 books this book cites

4 books cite this book:

Taras Bulba (Modern Library) by Nikolai Gogol in Back Flap
Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus by Robert D. Kaplan in Front Matter
Lord Jim & Nostromo (Modern Library) by Joseph Conrad in Front Matter
Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos by Robert D. Kaplan in Front Matter

What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

	56% buy the item featured on this page: An Empire Wilderness : Travels into America's Future 3.9 out of 5 stars (48)
	15% buy The Ends of the Earth: From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia, a Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy 4.0 out of 5 stars (62) $10.88
	11% buy Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus 4.4 out of 5 stars (49) $10.17
	10% buy The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War 3.9 out of 5 stars (75) $10.17

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Customer Reviews

48 Reviews

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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Once Again Kaplan Sees the Hidden Patterns, October 16, 2001

By	Stephen M. Kerwick (Wichita, KS United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America's Future (Paperback)

Robert Kaplan has always excelled in explaining little known parts of the world to Americans. Balkan Ghosts and The Coming Anarchy more than demonstrate his ability to see behind the scenes and point out the deeper threads that television and radio news (and news magazines) overlook. In fact, it might be fair to describe him as an All Things Considered or 60 Minutes for serious grownups. I have never finished one of his books without being a much better informed, and generally just better, reader for my trouble.

In Empire Wilderness, Kaplan does all of this for the United States, although in the quieter portions of the nation from the Mississippi to the Pacific, with emphasis on the deep Great Plains and Arizona. In doing so, as ususal, the author picks up on some social and demographic trends that are significant and profound in how they will change the "white bread" America of the 20th Century into something a good deal different. Kaplan's work seldom cheers the reader up with prospects for the future, although it is always impeccably well written. On the other hand, it absolutely never fails to educate, usually on an underappreciated subject. This time, the subject isn't just close to home, it is home.

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26 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars American Travel Writing from an Alternate Dimension, March 25, 2000

By	Adam Luedtke "chairman_luedtke" (Salt Lake City) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America's Future (Paperback)

While Kaplan keeps to his usual winning combination of travel writing and social science in "Empire Wilderness," he cannot avoid falling prey to the very same flaws that marred his last book, "Ends of the Earth"; namely, a tendency to over-emphasize pervailing social trends until he begins to sound like some kind of prophet of doom, forecasting a world out of control. When writing about the Third World, this is somewhat more forgiveable approach, but when applied to the United States, the reader begins to wonder how Kaplan can, in good conscience, hype and sensationalize some of the trends on which he chooses to focus. In his writings for the "Atlantic Monthly," Kaplan has admitted to a Hobbesian, conservative view of human nature, and this, at times, makes him sound like a rabid elitist frightened by the dark, deprived "mob" seething beneath the shining surface of America. This is a somewhat unfair characterization, however, as most of Kaplan's social observations demonstrate a stunning ability to forecast history and cut to the heart of the most salient political and economic trends facing our nation. The extra hype and generalization are probably just to sell more books, so we can let Kaplan off the hook on this one. Just be prepared to read this book skeptically, and you are in for one hell of a journey.

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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Escaping the Pods with Little Desert Light, August 18, 2005

By	Michael F. Munday (Tucson, AZ) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America's Future (Paperback)

HISTORY IS DESTINY. Believe that and there's still no guarantee you'll read An Empire Wilderness: Travels Into America's Future without frustration. This is no traditional history book.

Here, geography determines history, so that life on the North American continent--from the dense jungles of Qunitana Roo at Mexico's big-toe to Canada's frozen bellybutton in Hudson Bay, and Kansas cornfields somewhere in between--is the logical result of landscape necessity. Military action is an apparent exception.

The Civil War changed everything. It was the pivot point to our present. And ever since, American military might has made the world safe for democracy, although it all may amount to a brief shining moment before democracy, too, fades in the inexorable sweep of historical tides. This could easily happen since the social contract which held us together as a nation, drawn from our viscerally felt relations to the "vast wilderness," no longer holds as national glue, dried out with the nation's expansion across the continent and the effective shrinking of the planet. But, our military should keep us from falling over the edge into the terrors of the Millennium.

These are just a few of the assumptions you've got to buy not to get angst from reading An Empire Wilderness, author Robert D. Kaplan's latest, wide-ranging, difficult and uneven work. Kaplan's project since the late 1980s is to foresee the world we'll find in the 21st century. To do this, he's chosen to write travelogues, and he has journeyed to the front lines at the most dangerous and wretched places of the earth. Kaplan has more than once risked his life to get the story. In the Balkans with warring Croats and Serbs, with the Kurds on the Iran-Iraq border, in Africa, and the Far East.

In 1997, in his To The Ends of The Earth, Kaplan told an "apocalyptic" tale of how most of the world beyond the reach of electricity, good plumbing, and decent food is flying apart. Poverty, disease and rapacious plundering of resources for the primary benefit of the First World will never allow the Third World to catch up, propelling pent forces in the "underground" of the planet to explode, rupturing the comfortable bubble covering Western civilization. Now, Kaplan turns his sights on home.

The American tour Kaplan takes is to no one place--he would journey to the horizons of an America being reborn at the harrowing precipice of the 21st century. Edging the borders of this American Century, Kaplan weaves together a tapestry of pieces bubbling over with keen observation and insight, the best of which have already appeared over the last five years in the Atlantic Monthly. What emerges is a patchwork designed to show the devolution of the United States towards a loosely-held confederation of city-states, an "empire" Kaplan foresees entering a "silver age" of civilized prosperity.

Kaplan follows the trails of soldier-explorers and pioneers who were the first to encounter the wilderness of the North American West. And like them, he finds what may seem strange and new, presenting a picture of North America that those living the experience are not likely to see.

What Kaplan finds at the edge of tomorrow includes: 1) A decentralized empire built of steel, glass, marble and polymers designed from no geographic or cultural origins, inhabited by an international mosaic of people from distant cultures, all living in city-states with a vast no-man's land between. 2) World-wide corporations replacing government services in all but regional defense and dispute resolution.

Kaplan starts and ends his journey to the New America with homages to the military strategic training center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, near where the Spanish conquistadors led by Coronado ended their entry into the American heartland.
Kaplan treks mountain roads, talks with just plain and mightier folk, and ruminates across the continent's Westside--from Canada's Rockies to the Pacific Coast, from Mississippi riverboat casinos to Orange County high-end malls, and from Mexico City north through Sinaloa and Sonora across the border to Tucson. He bypasses Phoenix, writing it off as an oasis of "lawns, shopping centers and office parks." Much of the book is written in a mournful tone, just above a dirge.
"What we call 'the border' has always been a wild, unstable swath of desert, hundreds of miles wide, where culture was always as thin as the vegetation," says Kaplan early on in his discussion of the differences between Mexico and the Arizona borderlands.
Kaplan's view of borderland history minimizes the fact that the Spanish did not come with soldiers alone. Like the good exemplar of Roman tradition it was, Spain presented a fist and an open hand. With the fist came the Conquistadores, who sought gold. With the open hand came the padres, who sought to cultivate souls. Kaplan chooses to see the borderland in terms of the Conquistadors alone, and ignores the padres who stayed. And this was slow, patient work, the cultivating of souls. The only padre Kaplan mentions is Fray Junipero Serra: Kaplan stays at a hotel named for him in Tepic, Nayarit, Mexico.
Many of those who have seen the borderlands desert for the first time see it as empty of life. Kaplan is no different. "A cindery wasteland stubbled by thorns," he calls the Sonoran Desert. He shows no signs of having read the commentators on desert life and histories such as Officer, Nabhan, Fontana, Yetman or Sheridan. But he does quote from names familiar to local politicos--Bowden, Franzi, Smith, McKasson and a mysterious unnamed Tucson city appartchik, who for all their fervor and crisp soundbites, provide here more heat than light.

Kaplan emerges from his short Arizona desert stay with the unremarkable insight that what goes on in D.C. doesn't really make much sense in the real world.

Nevertheless, the best of what Kaplan does in these pages is the result of keen observation and powerful, provocative insight. But don't expect depth.

This is a top-level view, for all Kaplan's riding in Mexican buses. It's a set of first impressions, stoked by a partial historical eye. His writing is not really for those living in the desert or any of the urban "pods."

This book is primarily directed at the members of the elite who live by cellular phone, and whose best address is an electronic mailbox. It will undoubtedly make a very compelling PBS series.
original: 09-14-1998, Tucson Weekly)

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars another brilliant piece of work by Robert Kaplan
I like to read a lot about other countries. With this book, I read about my own country and saw it with completely new eyes -- with some alarm, and some acceptance -- but... Read more

Published on January 19, 2007 by Renee B. Fulton

4.0 out of 5 stars Pre-2000 view of future of US
Kaplan fits in with a growing list of writers from Patrick Buchanan to Al Gore who see lots of trouble for the US in the future. Read more

Published on January 18, 2007 by Mark E. Baxter

4.0 out of 5 stars A Book Overtaken by Events
Events, namely one big one (9/11), have pretty much overtaken this book, copyrighted 1998, rendering most of the sociological observations academic or even dated, leaving only a... Read more

Published on June 29, 2006 by zorba

5.0 out of 5 stars Understanding America
Kaplan has finally applied his great talents of digging into details and deriving trends to America. Read more

Published on August 3, 2005 by Umesh Vyas

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting but already dated
In Kaplan's book, he sees the changing nature of cities and suburbs, and it's quite fascinating at times. Read more

Published on April 17, 2005 by R.J.

5.0 out of 5 stars Robert Delivers
This is a terrific, thought-provoking, clear-eyed look at what the future may hold. I find this book to be far more powerful and cogent than "Megatrends" and its ilk. Read more

Published on November 3, 2004 by Clayton Bosler

4.0 out of 5 stars KAPLAN EXPLORES ALTERNATIVE CORSES OF HISTORY
Reading this book after being away from the United States for 75% of the past three and a half years I looked at it as a tabula rasa for the future of America. Read more

Published on September 19, 2004 by B. C. PLANT

1.0 out of 5 stars Positive Reviewers are so Naive
Just because one never experiences racism or does not practice it or because a few CEO's are "minorities" does not mean we can say "problem solved". Read more

Published on February 11, 2004 by joe

4.0 out of 5 stars Negative reviewers are hilarious
Kaplan writes what he sees and hears. He directly quotes the people he meets. Accusing him of racist and bigotry is like blaming the TV weatherman for an oncoming hurricane.

Published on December 4, 2003 by sengssk

1.0 out of 5 stars Veiled Issues
Kaplan's piece in the Atlantic Monthly "The Coming Anarchy" should give you a sense of what this book, An Enpire Wilderness, will offer. Read more

Published on November 27, 2003 by Mike

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