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An Empire Wilderness : Travels into America's Future
by Robert D. Kaplan
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Random House (1998-08-18)
ISBN: 0679451900
EAN: 9780679451907
Dewy Decimal #: 978
Hardcover: 393 pages
Edition: 1st
Release Date: 1998-08-18
SKU: 22281
Condition: New
Comments: Random House, 1998. 1ST EDITION. UNABRIDGED. HARDCOVER W/GILT LETTERING, DUST JACKET AND PAGES ARE NEW. Rapid shipping w/FREE tracking. Overseas by Airmail.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
Having reported on some of the world's most violent, least understood regions in his bestsellers Balkan Ghosts and The Ends of the Earth, Robert Kaplan now returns to his native land, the United States of America. Traveling, like Tocqueville and John Gunther before him, through a political and cultural landscape in transition, Kaplan reveals a nation shedding a familiar identity as it assumes a radically new one.
An Empire Wilderness opens in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where the first white settlers moved into Indian country and where Manifest Destiny was born. In a world whose future conflicts can barely be imagined, it is also the place where the army trains its men to fight the next war. "A nostalgic view of the United States is deliberately cultivated here," Kaplan writes, "as if to bind the uncertain future to a reliable past."
From Fort Leavenworth, Kaplan travels west to the great cities of the heartland--to St. Louis, once a glorious shipping center expected to outshine imperial Rome and now touted, with its desolate inner city and miles of suburban gated communities, as "the most average American city." Kaplan continues west to Omaha; down through California; north from Mexico, across Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas; up to Montana and Canada, and back through Oregon.
He visits Mexican border settlements and dust-blown county sheriffs' offices, Indian reservations and nuclear bomb plants, cattle ranches in the Oklahoma Panhandle, glacier-mantled forests in the Pacific Northwest, swanky postsuburban sprawls and grim bus terminals, and comes, at last, to the great battlefield at Vicksburg, Mississippi, where an earlier generation of Americans gave their lives for their vision of an American future. But what, if anything, he asks, will today's Americans fight and die for?
At Vicksburg Kaplan contemplates the new America through which he has just traveled--an America of sharply polarized communities that draws its population from pools of talent far beyond its borders; an America where the distance between winners and losers grows exponentially as corporations assume gov-ernment functions and the wealthy find themselves more closely linked to their business associates in India and China than to their poorer neighbors a few miles away; an America where old loyalties and allegiances are vanishing and new ones are only beginning to emerge. The new America he found is in the pages of this book. Kaplan gives a precise and chilling vision of how the most successful nation the world has ever known is entering the final, and highly uncertain, phase of its history.
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Amazon.com Review
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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Customer Reviews
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another brilliant piece of work by Robert Kaplan
Rating  (5)
Date: 2007-01-20
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
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.
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Pre-2000 view of future of US
Rating  (4)
Date: 2007-01-18
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
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.
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A Book Overtaken by Events
Rating (4)
Date: 2006-06-29
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
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.
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Escaping the Pods with Little Desert Light
Rating (4)
Date: 2005-08-18
8 out of 8 customers found this reveiw helpful
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 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 discussion 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 the borderland in terms of the Conquistadors alone, and ignores the padres who stayed. And this was slow, patient work, the cultivating of souls. The only padre Kaplan mentions is Fray Junipero Serra: Kaplan stays at a hotel named for him in Tepic, Nayarit, Mexico.
Many of those who have seen the borderlands desert for the first time see it as empty of life. Kaplan is no different. "A cindery wasteland stubbled by thorns," he calls the Sonoran Desert. He shows no signs of having read the commentators on desert life and histories such as Officer, Nabhan, Fontana, Yetman or Sheridan. But he does quote from names familiar to local politicos--Bowden, Franzi, Smith, McKasson and a mysterious unnamed Tucson city appartchik, who for all their fervor and crisp soundbites, provide here more heat than light.
Kaplan emerges from his short Arizona desert stay with the unremarkable insight that what goes on in D.C. doesn't really make much sense in the real world.
Nevertheless, the best of what Kaplan does in these pages is the result of keen observation and powerful, provocative insight. But don't expect depth.
This is a top-level view, for all Kaplan's riding in Mexican buses. It's a set of first impressions, stoked by a partial historical eye. His writing is not really for those living in the desert or any of the urban "pods."
This book is primarily directed at the members of the elite who live by cellular phone, and whose best address is an electronic mailbox. It will undoubtedly make a very compelling PBS series.
original: 09-14-1998, Tucson Weekly)
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Understanding America
Rating (5)
Date: 2005-08-03
2 out of 3 customers found this reveiw helpful
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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