Author of Balkan Ghosts, Robert D. Kaplan now travels from West Africa to Southeast Asia to report on a world of disintegrating nation-states, warring nationalities, metastasizing populations, and dwindling resources. He emerges with a gritty tour de force of travel writing and political journalism. Whether he is walking through a shantytown in the Ivory Coast or a death camp in Cambodia, talking with refugees, border guards, or Iranian revolutionaries, Kaplan travels under the most arduous conditions and purveys the most startling truths. Intimate and intrepid, erudite and visceral, The Ends of the Earth is an unflinching look at the places and peoples that will make tomorrow's headlines--and the history of the next millennium.
"Kaplan is an American master of...travel writing from hell...Pertinent and compelling." --The New York Times Book Review
"An impressive work. Most travel books seem trivial beside it." --The Washington Post Book World
CONTENTS:
I. West Africa: Back to the Dawn? 1. An Unsentimental Journey 2. Sierra Leone: From Graham Green to Thomas Malthus? 3. Along the Gulf of Guinea
II. The Nile Valley: The Hollow Pyramid 4. "Oriental Despotism" 5. Islamic Coketown 6. Voices of the "Tormented City"
III. Anatolia and the Caucasus: The Earth's Strategic Core? 7. "The Still Point of the Turning World" 8. Mother Lode 9. By Caspian Shores
IV. The Iranian Plateau: The Earth's Soft Centre 10. A Country of Flowers and Nightingales 11. The Revolution of "the Hand" 12. Bazaar States 13. Qom's Last Tremors 14. The Heart of Persia 15. The Tower of Qabus
V. Central Asia: Geographical Destinies 16. Russian Outpost 17. Pre-Byzantine Turks and Civilization Clashes 18. Clean Toilet and the Legacy of Empires 19. China: "Super-Chaos" and "Physical-Social" Theory 20. Strategic Hippie Routes 21. The Roof of the World 22. The Last Map
VI. The Indian Subcontinent and Indochina: The Way of the Future? 23. Journey in a Plague Year 24. Rishi Valley and Human Ingenuity 25. Bangkok: Environmental and Sexual Limits 26. Laos, or Greater Siam? 27. Cambodia: Back to Sierra Leone? 28. Jungle Temples and the "Milk of Chaos" 29. One Death at the Edge of the Earth
Robert D. Kaplan is the bestselling author of twenty books on foreign affairs and travel translated into many languages, including Adriatic,The Good American, The Revenge of Geography, Asia’s Cauldron, Monsoon, The Coming Anarchy, and Balkan Ghosts. He holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. For three decades he reported on foreign affairs for The Atlantic. He was a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and the U.S. Navy’s Executive Panel. Foreign Policy magazine twice named him one of the world’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers.”
View titles by Robert D. Kaplan
Author of Balkan Ghosts, Robert D. Kaplan now travels from West Africa to Southeast Asia to report on a world of disintegrating nation-states, warring nationalities, metastasizing populations, and dwindling resources. He emerges with a gritty tour de force of travel writing and political journalism. Whether he is walking through a shantytown in the Ivory Coast or a death camp in Cambodia, talking with refugees, border guards, or Iranian revolutionaries, Kaplan travels under the most arduous conditions and purveys the most startling truths. Intimate and intrepid, erudite and visceral, The Ends of the Earth is an unflinching look at the places and peoples that will make tomorrow's headlines--and the history of the next millennium.
"Kaplan is an American master of...travel writing from hell...Pertinent and compelling." --The New York Times Book Review
"An impressive work. Most travel books seem trivial beside it." --The Washington Post Book World
CONTENTS:
I. West Africa: Back to the Dawn? 1. An Unsentimental Journey 2. Sierra Leone: From Graham Green to Thomas Malthus? 3. Along the Gulf of Guinea
II. The Nile Valley: The Hollow Pyramid 4. "Oriental Despotism" 5. Islamic Coketown 6. Voices of the "Tormented City"
III. Anatolia and the Caucasus: The Earth's Strategic Core? 7. "The Still Point of the Turning World" 8. Mother Lode 9. By Caspian Shores
IV. The Iranian Plateau: The Earth's Soft Centre 10. A Country of Flowers and Nightingales 11. The Revolution of "the Hand" 12. Bazaar States 13. Qom's Last Tremors 14. The Heart of Persia 15. The Tower of Qabus
V. Central Asia: Geographical Destinies 16. Russian Outpost 17. Pre-Byzantine Turks and Civilization Clashes 18. Clean Toilet and the Legacy of Empires 19. China: "Super-Chaos" and "Physical-Social" Theory 20. Strategic Hippie Routes 21. The Roof of the World 22. The Last Map
VI. The Indian Subcontinent and Indochina: The Way of the Future? 23. Journey in a Plague Year 24. Rishi Valley and Human Ingenuity 25. Bangkok: Environmental and Sexual Limits 26. Laos, or Greater Siam? 27. Cambodia: Back to Sierra Leone? 28. Jungle Temples and the "Milk of Chaos" 29. One Death at the Edge of the Earth
Robert D. Kaplan is the bestselling author of twenty books on foreign affairs and travel translated into many languages, including Adriatic,The Good American, The Revenge of Geography, Asia’s Cauldron, Monsoon, The Coming Anarchy, and Balkan Ghosts. He holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. For three decades he reported on foreign affairs for The Atlantic. He was a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and the U.S. Navy’s Executive Panel. Foreign Policy magazine twice named him one of the world’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers.”
View titles by Robert D. Kaplan
From Mark Twain to Langston Hughes, from Saul Bellow to David Sedaris: Three Centuries of Americans Writing About Their Romance (and Frustrations) with Paris
From Henry James, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway to Peter Mayle and Adam Gopnik--A Feast of British and American Writers Celebrate France
From Mark Twain to Langston Hughes, from Saul Bellow to David Sedaris: Three Centuries of Americans Writing About Their Romance (and Frustrations) with Paris
From Henry James, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway to Peter Mayle and Adam Gopnik--A Feast of British and American Writers Celebrate France