Rating: 
Summary: Well, if you spend your time in the wilderness...
Review: I buy a lot of what Mr. kaplan says. However, I live in a different America: the urban midwest.
Take Chicago as an example. The best and brightest of this city live in one of two types of places: the suburban "Schaumburg" type of neighborhood or the urban "Lincoln Park" type of community. I happen to live in the actual city, and I can tell you that it is a vibrant place with many new condominiums and businesses sprouting up in all kinds of neighborhoods. Though it has it's problems, Chicago the city has a great future ahead of it. After the baby boomers retire can you say the same of Schaumburg?
Not all of the educated, wealthy class want to live in suburban pods or gated communities. Some of us want to live in real neighborhoods with access to real people and real cultural opportunities. The rest of you can have your edge cities, your gated communities in Phoenix or wherever. I'll take a real neighborhood, in a real city, rough edges and all.
Rating: 
Summary: At the Nation's end.
Review: America may exist as an idea, but it has ceased to exist as a nation. The country remains on the map, of course. But one ought no longer to assume that its citizenry share the same bed-rock values or cultural heritage that formerly united us. In brief, earlier assumptions of national unity no longer stand up to real scrutiny. That is the message of Robert D. Kaplan's journey through the American west. Kaplan asserts that this part of the country best exposes the rents in the national fabric.As an experienced foreign reporter, Kaplan has subjected other countries to similar scrutiny: Afghanistan, the Balkans, west Africa. He finds that America, despite its apparent prosperity, is not exempt from a growing crisis of national authority throughout the globe. Politicians and professional public commentators (noticeably locked on America's two prosperous coasts) continue to presume national unity. Their jobs, after all, depend on keeping up appearances. But the idea of the nation-state is wearing thin, here as elsewhere around the globe. This appears to be the result of inevitable economic forces. It is well nigh impossible to keep mobile, competitive industries from gravitating toward cheap labor. What is scary is that many of our elites (academics, think-tankers, business people) actually applaud this move away from nationalism. Very few of our elites advocate on behalf of a cosmopolitan and non-racist form of patriotism. Robert D. Kaplan is an exception. But he is also a pessimist who has accurately assessed the current political climate. Unlike the anti-NAFTA crusaders with their various ideologies -- from Pat Buchanan on the right to Ralph Nader and Michael Moore on the left -- Kaplan is ideologically neutral. He does not have an agenda. Untainted by political rhetoric, his descriptions have a quality of gutsy, no-nonsense realism. Yet, the picture he paints shares points in common with both the nationalist right and the blue-collar left. We live in a tottering class-divided society: disloyal and legalistic at the top and virtually anarchic at the bottom. Kaplan points out that the financial empire embedded in our country is breaking away from the nation that nurtured it in to existence. As a result, racial and class divisions are becoming more extreme. The affluent are turning their neighborhoods in to what Kaplan calls "urban pods" whose inhabitants are no more than "resident expatriates... with their foreign cuisines, eclectic tastes, exposure to foreign languages and friends throughout the world." It is this group -- highlighted in his travels to the suburbs of St. Louis, Omaha, and especially Orange County -- who he gently blames for our current malaise. Yet these also make up the prosperous sectors of our economy, and Kaplan rightly applauds their economic savvy. In this respect, he greatly differs from the Buchanan and Nader wings of the political spectrum. On the other extreme, jails proliferate for housing the violent. From his experience in unstable countries abroad, Kaplan has learned to realistically evaluate the social distress caused by unemployed young males. Historically, it is this group who make up the bulk of the criminal population. Previous methods of controlling this sector are now obsolete. The future of our armed forces as a professional (essentially mercenary) army rules out compulsory military service as a counter-balance away from anarchic disloyalty - a solution that works well in countries like Germany and Israel. Refreshingly, Kaplan does not have an agenda. His approach is considerably more empirical than the waves of "big idea" writers produced by the think-tanks and the Ivy-League schools. In this book, facts precede theories; not the other way round. He is obsessed with the intricate little differences between localities. One of his especially strong suits is his openness to surprise. In his description of Orange County, for example, he admits that his visit there altered his preconception. He commends its planners' ability to create a suburban culture with an industrial tax base, quality housing, and mall-sized commercial retail side-by-side. The point is, however, that as its style of town-planning grows (and it surely will!), not only the affluent, but also the tax-paying corporations will evacuate the cities en masse, leaving an under-class of criminals and their victims to haunt once lively cities. As the nation recedes, various city-states will emerge like points of light out of an unilluminated background. Kaplan's book is populated with real characters who make each place he visits come alive: Army officers at Fort Leavenworth, a black policemen and a white urban planner in St. Louis, a community college president and grassroots organizers in Omaha, a real-estate consultant in Orange County, poor people along the Mexican border and an aristocratic elite in Mexico City, a gun-toting environmentalist anarchist in Arizona, Native American leaders, atomic engineers at Texas' Pantech facility, and countless others. Kaplan gives encyclopedic details about the history of each place he visits. He would likely agree with William Faulkner's view that the past is never really behind us. He is comfortable with historical analogies that are hundreds of years old. Punctuated throughout the book are discussions of ancient military campaigns, conquistadors and French explorers, and civil war stratagems. What is more, Kaplan arranges this material so that its relevancy shines through. Kaplan's book stands well apart from virtually all of the jeremiads of globalists or anti-globalists. The book is complex and subtle, and refuses to reduce itself to some slogan. This makes it hard to pin a political label on Kaplan. He does not appear to think that we can "solve" the problems he raises by more federal spending. Yet he often makes pleas for the unifying presence of active government involvement. You might read him as a cultural conservative - a pessimistic nationalist who favors aggressive policing and cultural consistency, and distrusts easy answers of the kind Liberals live for. However, he appears to favor the power of local interventions that ease class divisions and he quite despises racism. Perhaps, then, he is a pragmatic centrist defending the increasingly undefended patriotism of old time Guns-and-Butter Dems. Whatever you want to call him, Kaplan has a great eye for detail. This book is required reading for anyone wishing to get beyond the protracted in-fighting over globalism in order to get a clearer picture of what is really at stake. My guess is that intellectuals of my generation (i.e. twenty-somethings) will look back on Kaplan's books as tools that helped free them from the some of the outworn ideas of the Baby-Boomers (perhaps, the way that Boomer intellectuals of the left look back on David Halberstam or those on the right look back on Friedrich Hayek). Or, at least, that's what I hope.
Rating:
Summary: The America no one wants to see
Review: Kaplan does an excelent job describing those citizens that have fallen through the cracks: the bus station denizens, shack dwelling TV junkies, and drug pushing Robinhoods. But there is also a brighter side to Kaplan's work, such as the couple in East St. Louis working hard to revitalize old neighborhoods, and the Vietnamese immigrint who realized the American dream. An excelent book, well worth reading two or three times.
Rating:
Summary: Amazing
Review: Buy it, read it. Worthwhile at every page. Most interesting is Kaplan's journey through Navajo/Hopi lands. Overall, his descriptions of Arizona were on the money... However, in his book he had an interview at the "El Indio" restaurant in Tucson but failed to mention that the salsa is amazing. Other than that, the book was sincere and candid.
Rating:
Summary: Once Again Kaplan Sees the Hidden Patterns
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: How and Where do you want to Live?
Review: Powerful book showing us where we are moving as a society in the U.S. Ultimately, one finishes this book asking themselves...Am I destined to live in ways like those described in the book. I for one hope I don't.
Rating:
Summary: WHAT is HAPPENING to MY Country?
Review: I'm a major fan of Robert Kaplans books. I was especially curious to read this, because after all of his foreign ventures, I wondered what he would write about the United States. It was interesting, in many places scary. Keep in mind, America was created by ideas. Unlike most nations, we are not united by religion, language, etc, but ideas. If those ideas ever break down, so does this country into economic units. We took the Southwest from Mexico in 1848. At the rate things are going, they will win Round 2. What separates English Canada from us is really psychological. Economically and physically, the axis is North South, not East West. What is happening to my country? Tune in...
Rating:
Summary: Great Analysis. Wonderful Stories.
Review: I am always surprised when I hear that someone finds this book to be pessimistic. I find the book to be a very realistic and accurate observation of where America is today and where we might be heading in the future. In fact, some parts of the book are extrodinarily optimistic, especially the discussions of how North Americans on the west coast -- from Vancouver to Los Angeles -- are building a successful multi-cultural society.The nation-state is a relatively new phenomenon and there isn't any reason to believe that it's the final model of human political organization. The fall of communism and the revolution in computer and communication techologies are exterting great pressures for new models to emerge in which people control politics, language, and culture at the local level, while coming together across borders to trade with each other. This trend is very prevelant in Europe.As Kaplan points out, this trend is present North America as well, for example with people in Vancouver (not to menton Quebec) feeling apart and seperate from the Canadian union while clamoring to expand trade through NATFA.There are big societal changes on the way. Kaplan clearly sees glimpses of them today. I find this book to be one of the most compelling books of our time. I highly recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: What will North America be like?
Review: After traveling and reporting in 70 countries, Kaplan comes back home and wonders, in light of his other trips, what will happen to the United States in the promising but difficult future ahead. This trip is a real challenge, for it is harder to talk about one's country than about other, foreign places. So Kaplan, a man of the East Coast, decides to go west, where the population is growing fastest, and social trends are newer and stranger. Starting and finishing among military people, what Kaplan finds in North America, from Mexico City to Vancouver, is the same trend he has found everywhere: the silent transformation of the Nation-state into something different. He finds the post-urban society, in both ends of the economic and social spectrum: the suburban secluded communities, light-years away from the poor, living in fortresses protected from the immediate outside and connected to the remote through computer terminals. And the slums, the Indian reservations, the misery belts, ridden with gangs and night shootings and strange people alienated from the modern comfort. Kaplan finds that the federal government is increasingly irrelevant for the determination of where the nation is going to. The City-state is more likely than the nation, in the future. The world transforming itself every day, under our very eyes.
Rating: 
Summary: A premature obituary for the United States
Review: Kaplan travels throughout the western US (except California, Nevada, or Utah), and also travels to Mexico and British Columbia, to seek the real meaning of the US and to divine its future. A lot of attention is given to Arizona, where the author emphasizes the economic/racial divide in cities like Tucson and Phoenix, as well as the numbing hopelessness of Indian reservations. Kaplan argues that the notion of nationhood is crumbling due to globalization coupled with economic and racial polarization. Hence, the Tucson underclass has more allegiance to the working class of Mexico than to the abstract concept of the United States, and similarly, Tucson's educated élite has more allegiance to their counterparts in Canada or Europe than to the United States as a nation. In short, Kaplan argues that patriotism is an obsolete concept. As an essay on the meaning of the US, the author seems to overreach in making his point; it would have worked better as a magazine essay. As a travelogue, the book relies too heavily on interviews with community leaders who give the usual predictable platitudes. The best part of the book is the chapter where Kaplan forsakes his car to travel by bus, which turns out to be a rolling bin of the homeless and mentally ill. The weakest part deals with Vancouver, where the author appears to have been sucked in by local boosters who are convinced that their province will join Oregon and Washington to form a new political entity. Kaplan gushes about Vancouver but is blind to its horrible transportation problems, its poverty, and its racial friction. The author's earlier book, 'The Ends of the Earth,' was a superb work of travel-journalism, but 'An Empire Wilderness' is not its equal.
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