Kaplan: America's Future Robert D. Kaplan: An Empire Wilderness, Travels into America's Future

Hardcover: 375 pages
Publisher: Random House 1998
ISBN: 0679776877

Kaplan - one of my favorite authors - writes with enviable ease; gliding through history, connecting historical places and actors, combining everything into a constantly evolving continuum that seems rational yet simultaneously he neglects not the babel character of our shared reality.

Kaplan writes about the contemporary sole superpower but connects features of it's development to places like Afghanistan and Bosnia. He benchmarks contemporary US to ancient Rome, travels in the Midwest, yet talks about Central Asia.

Kaplan's fast thinking makes the reading experience highly entertaining and informative. He underlines the power of ideas and the power of geography in shaping the US and the world. Geopolitical and geoeconomical trends are tilting the US focus from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the east-west horizon to the north-west unite creating areas and regions (such as Cascadia) and undermining the federal power.

"...economic optimism is the closest thing America has ever had to a real ideology..."

Kaplan feels that while America had the tabula rasa in lacking the tragic history of the Old World, it's power in shaping the world is also fundamentally changing itself. USA is a creature constantly undergoing transformation, Kaplan shows where it might be heading.

Political travelogue is my preferred style of literature.

Second opinion: Thurston Clarke / NY Times (requires registration)

  ¶ 2/21/2006 12:40:00 ap.