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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 508
EAN num: 9780679776871
ISBN number: 0679776877
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 416
Printing Date: September 07, 1999
Publishing house: Vintage
Release Date: September 07, 1999
Sale Popularity Level: 350085
Studio: Vintage
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'Full of surprises and unusual revelations . . . an informed and disturbing portrait of the new American badlands.'--Chicago Tribune
'[Kaplan is] tireless, curious, and smart. . . . I cannot imagine anyone will concoct a more convincing scenario for the American future.' --Thurston Clarke, The New York Times
With the same prescience and eye for telling detail that distinguished his bestselling Balkan Ghosts, Robert Kaplan now explores his native country, the United States of America. His starting point: the conviction that America is a country not in decline but in transition, slowly but inexorably shedding its identity as a monolithic nation-state and assuming a radically new one.
Everywhere Kaplan travels--from St. Louis, Missouri, to Portland, Oregon, from the forty-ninth parallel to the banks of the Rio Grande--he finds an America ever more fragmented along lines of race, class, education, and geography. An America whose wealthy communities become wealthier and more fortress-like as they become more closely linked to the world's business capitals than to the desolate ghettoes subsequent door. An America where the political boundaries between the states--and between the U.S. and Canada and Mexico--are becoming increasingly blurred, betokening a vast open zone for trade, commerce, and cultural interaction, the nexus of tomorrow's transnational world. Never nostalgic or falsely optimistic, bracingly unafraid of change and its consequences, Kaplan paints a startling portrait of post-Cold War America--a great nation entering the final, most uncertain phase of its history. Here is travel writing with the force of prophecy.
'Lively . . . Kaplan has a sharp eye for social truth, and his encounters with a chorus of eloquent citizens of the West keeps the narrative humming.' --Outside
Amazon.com:
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
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Rated by buyers 
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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 certainly with a renewed perspective.
Rated by buyers -
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. And although this book is written pre-9/11, it is still applicable. I find it interesting at this point 6 years after 9/11 that nothing has really changed in the US. The politics are the same, the issues are the same, the trade and national deficits keep growing, criminal aliens continue to invade, the military is over-committed even worse, and cultural institutions from schools to courts impose their wills on the rest of us. So yes, this almost 10 year old book still has something to say.
This book is really more of a political commentary than a travelogue. Kaplan travels mostly in Western North America. His writings about Mexico are worth while studying if you read nothing else in this book. This part of the book resembles a hard-hitting political expose. Kaplan pulls no punches and states that civility and respect for law are basic American attributes that are, on the whole, lacking in Mexicans. Kaplan's no racist, he just notes that the Mexican culture does not value these things because, among other reasons, the government and police are so corrupt that they are often the greatest danger to the average Mexican. The Mexican Police aren't just corrupt - they are the biggest criminals. How then do you expect to assimilate 20 million criminal aliens who feel this way? (You don't and that is one reason that Kaplan and a growing group feel that there are major changes in store for the US as we know it.)
Kaplan notes that the drug trade is what keeps even some of the Mexicans south of the border. If we ever do succeed in controlling the drug trade, Mexico would erupt over night into chaos, acording to Kaplan, and can you really disagree?
Unlike recent travelling commentators like Brit Martin Fletcher (Almost Heaven), Kaplan does not go out of his way to seek oddballs and nuts. That is one reason why his warnings have so much power.
The American parts of the book point out a growing loss of the middle class in much of America. With factory jobs heading south and overseas, the backbone of the American system is gone and there is nothing to replace it. Only so many of us can sell houses to each other or work for IBM. Where does the average American without a college degree go to find a high-paying job now? Kaplan has no answer.
Kaplan may be overly pessimistic but this book is excellent nevertheless. Feel free to refute his ideas, but you will definitely enjoy Kaplan's descriptions and thoughts. 4 stars.
Rated by buyers -
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 travelogue, albeit a very good one. The message I got from this book is that the U.S. is morphing from a nation-state into something new and hertofore unseen -- a North American entity without borders, an entity with a smaller government concerned mostly with military, environment and protecting the less fortunate among us. Maybe that's how things looked in 1998, but 9/11 presented a paradigm shift and I suspect that Kaplan, writing the same book today, eight years later, might revise some of his observations. In any case, I like Kaplan's books. They are the thinking man's travelogues and whether here or in some third world country, his interactions with the people he encounters are stimulting, educational and fascinating.
Rated by buyers -
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 very 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 discusion 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 ... Read More
Rated by buyers -
Kaplan has finally applied his great talents of digging into details and deriving trends to America. This book helps understand at least some parts of the soul of America, undiluted by media hype and political perspectives.
His description of the decline of inner cities is moving. And the rise of gated communities is haunting.
I particularly liked his description and analysis of the Mexican border and how the primary concerns there are not drugs and immigration.
Above all, he writes very well. So even if I doubt some of the conclusions, the book is very interesting to read and provokes a lot of fresh perspectives. Doing this for a country that is 'over-reported' is amazing.
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