The Ends of the Earth: From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia--A Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy

click here for more details, find new or used items	Robert D. Kaplan New from £21.00 Used from £36.13 Pages: (Hardcover) ISBN: 084467124X Pub: Peter Smith Pub Inc Pub date: 2001-06 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 1757715

Reader Reviews:

Disturbingly Good (1/1 people found this helpful)

This is not a travel book and should not be judged as such. No superficial talk here of pretty buildings, uncomfortable hotels or quaint wildlife. Robert Kaplan does not attempt to merely travel in geographic space, but ventures to travel in time. And the image he brings of the future is chilling. I will not try to judge what he writes - that would neither be fair nor appropriate, but how he writes it. In that respect, he is very effective. He almost made me feel the sensation (dread!) of being in these lands and very successfully transmitted his message of the future he fears. Actually, it is perhaps that sense of dread that makes me withold that 5th star. This text is an introduction to much food for thought. I would strongly recommend it.

"...wearing wedding dresses as they kill... (5/5 people found this helpful)

A previous reviewer made the following comment: "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." It isn't an urban myth: this actuallly too place in Liberia at the start of the civil war in July/August of the year that Iraq invaded Kuwait. I remember it well because I saw bizzar pictures of fighters with dresses pulled over their uniforms or clothes. Sometimes they even sported wigs. BBC, Time or The Economist might have photographs on file. What I like about Kaplan is that he tells us the truths our civil society tries so desperately hard to hide, i.e. that life isn't a guaranteed little house with a white picket fense; that our Western lifestyle is limited to a very small percentage of the world's population; and that this lifestyle is generally (but not always) at the expense of the majority (inadvertantly or otherwise). What is trully frightening is that this balance will correct itself violently if no attempts are made to mitigate the differences in life styles across the globe. I honestly think that we are too far down our chosen path to do anthing about the anarchy that awaits us.

Don't be fooled into thinking this is a simple travel book.. (3/4 people found this helpful)

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.

Beltway Talking Heads book disguised as travel narrative (0/4 people found this helpful)

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.

A good miserable book (0/0 people found this helpful)

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.

Categories

Amazon.co.uk places this book into the following categories: