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

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Summary: Don't be fooled into thinking this is a simple travel book..
Review: It seems aparent that many people look at this book thinking it is a travel book for possible vacationers. Obviousely, for any person with common sense, these are not places you would want to visit. Kaplan focus is more on the darker side of humanity, and what brings us to it. As seen with his foreboding telling of things to come in Balkan Ghosts, he has a gift of predicting serious human conflicts on our planet. But not only that, he has the remarkable ability to search for the most minor details to explain why. Most importantly though, Kaplan makes perfectly clear what many refuse to acknowledge...the human population of this planet is rapidly exceeding natural limits, while we fall behind drastically in ways to solve this problem. I highly recommend this book to anyone who feels that the relatively minor problems that we face on a day to day basis will soon be a pleasent memory if we don't wake up and realize what we are really doing.

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Summary: a journey into the heart of the future
Review: As Kaplan writes in Balkan Ghosts "The past is yesterday's present and the future tomorrow's past". Therefore, the events of today's headlines are less significant than the global trends. However, in his unsentimental journey, Kaplan is careful to avoid the pitfalls of endism, producing what is instead an informed, educated and nuanced account of the threats to development in the twenty-first century. Even he admits that it is but one person's account and therefore subject to bias and flaws (which are certainly present), but the very nature of his "unsentimental journey" (a concept which is invaluable to those of us trying to understand the paths which developing societies take), he is enlightening the reader about many parts of the world, and in fact the nature of social transformation itself. By emphasizing the nature of population growth and combining this with an examination of the state and its legitimacy, he goes beyond the traditional modernist paradigm to examine the dark heart of "progress". A great read which sustained and informed me through 3 months in Latin America (an area I wish he would address).

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Summary: Beltway Talking Heads book disguised as travel narrative
Review: I was severely disappointed. Other than the Togo sequence early in the book, Kaplan isn't interested in "travel" at all; he hardly ever talks to people on the streets, preferring to talk to each country's equivalent of Beltway insiders. Not bad as social studies, but this is NOT a travel book. A hundred years from now, there will be NO reason to read this book, which is not true of a good travel narrative.

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Summary: I think this book is a classic example of modern imperialism
Review: I don't disagree with Kaplan when he is reporting what he actually sees, which I think is well done. However his theories on the reasons for these things are almost always based on some idea of "culture", where this "culture" is completely fixed, doesn't change, and completely determines the actions of all the people in these "cultures". For example, Kaplan almost never seems to pay much attention to recent or medium-term political events or actions in the countries he's dealing with - the only sources are either current news reports or colonial texts from two hundred years before. He also almost never talks about the impressions of the scholars and intellectuals of the countries themselves - his "authoritative" information comes from American analysts or from imperial tracts written during the colonial period. Finally, and in my opinion almost damningly, the impression I had was that almost none of the people he speaks to in these countries ever has a name. So, in the end, Kaplan's images are of faceless, homogenous masses that have no analysts of their own, no politics, no decisions, no independence. All they have is "culture". When someone claims basically that a group of people's behavior is completely determined by their place of origin, we usually describe that as racism. I think that description fits Kaplan fairly well.

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Summary: A good miserable book
Review: Well crafted, insightful, wretchingly poetic, and horribly realistic. The ends of the earth, a slice of the misery from which Americans and other fortunate individuals in ordered societies are insulated, can upset their well-satiated stomachs. This is not a happy sweet book. Don't read it for dessert.

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Summary: A competent survey of the world's nastier places.
Review: Robert Kaplan leads you through an intelligent survey of some of the globe's nastier places. This is good book. It is smart, interesting, and should make people think about some problems most of us would rather ignore. It is not a great book. I would say Kaplan got too ambitious, and it shows. He tried to pack too many things - too many countries, too many ideas, too many stories - into one book. As a result it's a very reportorial work - it tells you the basics, it surprises you with interesting bits, and it even digs a little bit beyond the surface. But when it comes time to say "but what does it mean, Dorothy?" - zoom! We're off to the next hellhole on our tour. There's nothing wrong with reportorial, but Kaplan seems to promise something more. He doesn't deliver. He would have been better served by devoting more time to fewer countries. For instance, by his own admission he spent very little time in Laos and did not get a good picture of the country as a whole. Then why write about it? Would this be a worse book without the sketchy Laotian chapter? Hey, I've been in Malaysia for week, but I'm not writing a book about it. The holes in the book are filled with Kaplan's self-important wishy-washy musings. He's full of ideas, only they conflict with each other, and he can't decide which one is the best or how they should all fit together. After a couple of hundred pages, I was yelling "Look, do you have a conclusion or not? Because if you don't, why not have a lie down, figure out an answer, and THEN write it down!" It's fine to write "I didn't know what to think," it chapter 1, but by the end of the book, well, you should have a better idea what to think. You shouldn't endlessly pose the same answerless questions. Far too many chapters end with something like "There was no more time. I was off to (Togo/Turkmenistan/Laos)." Hmmm. Maybe he should have spent some more time thinking of some answers. I have to say I would have liked this book more if I had not read "Balkan Ghosts". With that book I felt Kaplan actually knew the area and understood the passions and fault lines that tear the Balkans apart. It raised my expectations for this book. In "The Ends of the Earth" we have to be content with what we see on the surface. We're not going anywhere, but we're making good time.

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Summary: The quintessential third world reader
Review: Over the past year, I have recommended this book to anyone and everyone interested "Third World" societies and their fate at the foot of the 21st century. I managed to aquire it in South America, and while not discussed in the actual text, it was absolutely appropriate for what I was experiencing. The book forced me to look deep into things I never considered, and sharpened my eye as I traveled around the Andes. Kaplan has an eye like an eagle and a manner of writing that thrusts you into his experiences. Moreover, he offers a critical look at and a profound understanding of areas on the globe that most fail to even recognize on a map. Absolutely fantastic - I've read it three times.

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Summary: a scary view of the future
Review: Robert Kaplan takes the reader on a journey to faraway countires most of us will never have the opportunity or desire to visit. This book, like Balkan Ghosts, is filled with gory details of political and ethnic violence. At times I wondered if his hersay stories like the one about members of a street gang in Africa wearing wedding dresses while they killed were actual events or just modern urban myths. I was constantly shocked to read about the extent of enviornmental damage done in the former soviet republics around the Caspian Sea. This book full of mind boggling statistics and engaing anecdotes but lacking in answers, suggestions or hope. This book left me wishing the mainstream press would spend more time on some of the topics covered by Kaplan. I look forward to his next book where this East Coast man takes on my home turf of California. Will he be as devistated by Orange County and the forests of the Pacific Coast as he is about the deforested continents of! Africa and SE Asia? We shall soon find out...

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Summary: amazingly thought provoking
Review: This was one of those books that is hard to put down. Kaplan provides insight to the decay of the nation state and how boundaries in much of the world are being redrawn according to ethnic and cultural lines. Having myself travelled in some of the parts of the world that Kaplan refers to in his book (Kazakhstan, Western China and surrounding area) I have to admire the man not only for his thought provoking book but also for his endurance and absolute lack of fear. Some of these locations are less than safe for the average Joe to be travelling in. This is a must read for sure.

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Summary: Pragmatic and objective
Review: Contrary to the review above,"he doesn't get it,"; Kaplan "gets it" all too well. Repeatedly in this book he cites the burdens of colonialism and the effects of haphardard geography and willingness to arm anyone claiming to be "democractic" or an anticommunist. I've had the opportunity to travel to some of his destinations and his reflections on the smells, the refuse and the human tragedy of mediocrity hits the mark. He unflinching frames failure in both developed and underdeveloped nations as a persistance of tribalism. Writing about places where non-white people dwell isn't always racist or narrowminded. This book is about first-hand experience and impressions; he balances these observations with facts, figures and literature. Kaplan's above being a neo-Richard Burton or Graham Greene; his work is valuable because it's objectivity with a twist of gut reaction so it's not CIA reports or embassey description. His contribution to und! erstanding the "Third World" is excellent as it is rare. Most importantly, the reader is spared the self-serving memoir or reflections of an academic on sabbical.