The Ends of the Earth : From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia, a Journey to the Frontiers ofAnarchy

Rating:
Summary: A tour of countries teetering on anarchy
Review: In this, the best of Kaplan's books, he seeks out the areas undergoing gut-wrenching change in search of broader lessons of the world's future. He travels between Guinea and Togo, mainly by bus, and later travels from Uzbekistan, to western China, to Pakistan by a combination of bus and rail. Other chapters describe his visits to Egypt, Turkey, Iran, India, Thailand, and Indochina, all involving overland journeys through the countryside, not just forays into the national capitals. Kaplan's larger point is that the system of sovereign nations is dissolving and being replaced by a struggle between the world's poor versus the world's well-off. As Kaplan describes the chaos of contrived political entities such as Pakistan, Liberia, and Togo, his arguments are convincing, although he readily acknowledges he chose his itinerary with the intention of demonstrating his point.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent, Colorful Descriptions with Brilliant Commentary
Review: I purchased this book expecting a bit of a travelog having never read Kaplan before. However, to my pleasant surprise, Kaplan gives wonderful insight into a host of socio-economic issues facing the countries he visited. He also never seems to forget to mention the upside of sometimes intolerable living conditions. Although a number of his opinions are derived from his personal experiences, he also sprinkles his commentary with the opinions and thoughts of other authors, researchers and philosophers making for a nice balance. A great read to say the least!

Rating:
Summary: A book for curious people
Review: This is a very interesting book. I'm interested in the different ways people live around the world, and this book covers a wide part of the countries that maybe I won't get to see at all in my life. First of all, this is one of those books that gives you a deeper level of "truth" than what the newspapers can give you, and the author himself admits he tried to be as objective as possible. In a newspaper article, there are different forces molding the trhuth here and there, or sometimes even changing it. Here, the only limit can be the author's point of view. Another good thing about the book is the way it offers many links between the present and the past: even though history is often an abstraction, in every country he traveled the author could find interesting historical links with the realities he encountered. The author says honestly in the introduction that a travel book is necessarily subjective. Personally, let alone the superficiality that I found in many parts of the book, what I didn't like about the book is the fact that Mr. Kaplan travels with too much presumption: it seems like, in his point of view, a country's economic and political conditions are the measure for the quality of each of its individual's life. Consequence: there's no better place to live than U.S. in the world (see p.226, when he's talking to the iranian woman). Can't there be different persons with better or worse situations and lives in Iran and in the U.S.? Basically, if you live in Iran, you can't be as satisfied as a person living in the U.S. can be, and if you tell Mr. Kaplan you are, then you're "lying to yourself" (p.226). I laughed at that point. Anyway, thanks to the author for his journey and his book, I'd really recommend it to anyone. I think I'm going to read the book he wrote about North America.

Rating:
Summary: Disturbingly Good
Review: This is not a travel book and should not be judged as such. No superficial talk here of pretty buildings, uncomfortable hotels or quaint wildlife. Robert Kaplan does not attempt to merely travel in geographic space, but ventures to travel in time. And the image he brings of the future is chilling. I will not try to judge what he writes - that would neither be fair nor appropriate, but how he writes it. In that respect, he is very effective. He almost made me feel the sensation (dread!) of being in these lands and very successfully transmitted his message of the future he fears. Actually, it is perhaps that sense of dread that makes me withold that 5th star. This text is an introduction to much food for thought. I would strongly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: A very worthy effort, but...
Review: Don't buy this book thinking it's merely a travelogue of some of the world's poorer and lesser-known nations. (In fact, if that's all you're looking for, then I highly recommend Pico Iyer's Falling off the Map instead.) No, it's a cleverly disguised sociopolitical analysis, but unlike most such works, it's refreshing in that Kaplan freely admits his observations are subjective and possibly wrong. But that's exactly the problem. Despite physically travelling to all these destinations, Kaplan seems to spend precious little time actually TALKING with real citizenry in most places. Instead he whisks from Western hotels in the capital to meetings with various pols and officials before scuttling off to the next country, sometimes just days later. And therein lies the failure of an otherwise worthy effort from an outstanding writer: the superficiality of most of his experiences in these places. Give him a few days in a country, coupled with a bit of background reading and perhaps a few conversations with experts at home, and Kaplan feels justified in making sweeping generalizations about where these nations have been, and where they are going. Had Kaplan just stopped country-hopping and stayed in one region for a longer time, I think his conclusions would have been much improved. A side note: having travelled to a number of these countries (as one of the "backpackers" that Kaplan scornfully derides throughout the book), his constant dramatizing of the mundane grows tedious after a while...I think the only person surprised that the third world can be dirty, smelly, and unpredictable is Kaplan himself.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant Analysis of 'Marginal' Regions' Massive Import
Review: Think that all the "in-betweener" regions and remote cultures of the globe are of marginal import in the 2000s? Dream on! This book will shake you up and get you scared straight with its superb reporting.

Rating:
Summary: This book is scary!
Review: Robert D. Kaplan paints a very scary picture of most of the world. Unforunately, I think he is right. The United States, Cananda, Western Europe, and Japan...we are the exceptions. The parts of the world that are relatively stable. Kaplan shows through his journies to different parts of the third world the coming anarchy. Kaplan shows too clearly what poverty, crime, religion, civil war, etc. are doing to the rest of the world. Kaplan is giving us a warning and a clear reason why we can never be isolationalist. We must do whatever we can to stop the anarchy that characterizes much of the world from spreading too far. This book is a great read and quite eye-opening.

Rating:
Summary: social science travel lit
Review: Basially, in "The Ends of the Earth", Kaplan employs the same finely-honed writing technique that he used to good effect on the topics of Yugoslavia and North America, respectively, in "Balkan Ghosts" and "Empire Wilderness" -- namely, to combine travel writing with social scientific analysis to craft a perspective on a locale that is both personal and abstract, immediate and general at the same time. This is a wonderful method, which makes his writing much less dry than other "country studies", but also leads to Kaplan's fatal flaw of over-exaggeration and over-generalization. His theses on the third world and its future (the basic topic of "Ends of the Earth") are ground-breaking, original, and probably a little bit too sensationalistic and over-hyped. Nevertheless, it's eye-opening stuff that takes you way beyond the news headlines and guidebooks.

Rating:
Summary: pretty hot
Review: It made me bust a nut in my pants every time I read a word. So at the end of the book I was in a sticky situation.

Rating:
Summary: A nice read, though a bit too shallow and wandering
Review: Although some parts are of great interest, I was surprised at how much time the writer uses getting a hotel or waiting in customs. I bought the book hoping to get a brief review of some remote corners of the world, and to some extent I did, but too many chapters seemed to be about dirty toilets in Uzbekistan. Some chapters, such as Iran, were very informative though too many others lack focus. Every now and then I buy a book (sight-unseen of course) from amazon.com that I know I would have never bought if I could have leafed through it in a store. This was one.