Average user rating:  |
 A book for curious people |
| This is a very interesting book. I'm interested in the different ways people live around the world, and this book covers a wide part of the countries that maybe I won't get to see at all in my life. First of all, this is one of those books that gives you a deeper level of "truth" than what the newspapers can give you, and the author himself admits he tried to be as objective as possible. In a newspaper article, there are different forces molding the trhuth here and there, or sometimes even changing it. Here, the only limit can be the author's point of view. Another good thing about the book is the way it offers many links between the present and the past: even though history is often an abstraction, in every country he traveled the author could find interesting historical links with the realities he encountered. The author says honestly in the introduction that a travel book is necessarily subjective. Personally, let alone the superficiality that I found in many parts of the book, what I didn't like about the book is the fact that Mr. Kaplan travels with too much presumption: it seems like, in his point of view, a country's economic and political conditions are the measure for the quality of each of its individual's life. Consequence: there's no better place to live than U.S. in the world (see p.226, when he's talking to the iranian woman). Can't there be different persons with better or worse situations and lives in Iran and in the U.S.? Basically, if you live in Iran, you can't be as satisfied as a person living in the U.S. can be, and if you tell Mr. Kaplan you are, then you're "lying to yourself" (p.226). I laughed at that point. Anyway, thanks to the author for his journey and his book, I'd really recommend it to anyone. I think I'm going to read the book he wrote about North America. |
| a scary view of the future |
| Robert Kaplan takes the reader on a journey to faraway countires most of us will never have the opportunity or desire to visit. This book, like Balkan Ghosts, is filled with gory details of political and ethnic violence. 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. I was constantly shocked to read about the extent of enviornmental damage done in the former soviet republics around the Caspian Sea. This book full of mind boggling statistics and engaing anecdotes but lacking in answers, suggestions or hope. This book left me wishing the mainstream press would spend more time on some of the topics covered by Kaplan. I look forward to his next book where this East Coast man takes on my home turf of California. Will he be as devistated by Orange County and the forests of the Pacific Coast as he is about the deforested continents of! Africa and SE Asia? We shall soon find out... |
 a journalistic fraud |
I bought this book for its rave reviews and thought I would learn something from it. When reading his chapters about Iran, I was quite disappointed to see that Kaplan does little more than to be taken around by his handlers to those they wished him to see and talk to. Furthermore, he does even less than a newcomer to the field would do; he does not even provide context or background. One of his primary interview subject is Mohsen Rafighdoost who stole so much that even his own backers could not tolerate him. Kaplan is also historically inaccurate and downright deceptive. He characterizes the Zoroastrian religion as pagan. He either does not know or he does this maliciously. This oldest monotheistic religion has been studied and discussed about so much that ignorance would not be a good enough excuse for its mischaracterization. Last, but not least, Kaplan borrows long paragraphs and essays from other authors about Iran where he thinks his stereotyping of the people needs backing. He does that without context and is patently fraudulent. For one, I have read "the garden of the brave in war" and where he borrows from that book, is arguably opposite to the intent of the author.
If this had been a "pay for purpose" work I would understand its content, but as a proposed "independent work of authorship" I believe it is no more than a waste of time and money. |
