An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America's Future: Amazon.co.uk: Robert D Kaplan: Books

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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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"AN EMPIRE WILDERNESS contains a very large number of new insights, startling observations, and provocative suggestions. The term "fresh look" has become somewhat of a cliche, but even those who disagree with some of the conclusions in this book will find that it fully deserves this characterization. No rehashing here of yesterday's editorials. A true original." -- Amitai Etzioni

"The finest foreign correspondent of his generation turns his eye and ear to his own country. Kaplan's tour of the American West is a tour de force of journalism and a provocation to anyone wondering where America's future is coming from and where it is going." -- H.W. Brands

"A brilliant and insightful writer whose ability to see the world as it is, not as he'd like it to be, has made him one of the most prescient chroniclers of our time." -- Wade Davis, Vancouver Sun

"Like Fukuyama, Kaplan is a broad-brush thinker whose large, provocative ideas serve as a spur to debate." -- Bruce Clark, Financial Times

"When you look at the long-run trends that are going on around the world -- you read articles like Robert Kaplan's article in the Atlantic a couple of months ago -- you could visualize a world in which a few million of us live in such opulence we could be starring on nighttime soaps. And the rest of us look like we're in one of those Mel Gibson Road Warrior movies. I was so gripped by the many things that were in that article... And I keep trying to imagine what it's going to be like to bring children into this world in this country." -- President Clinton

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

Intriguing Vision of America's Future 21 Sep 1998

By A Customer

Format:Hardcover

Empire Wilderness, though awkwardly named, is a very readable, very interesting look at how cities and communities are developing in the US. I read Kaplan's previous book, Ends of the Earth and my one criticism of Empire Wilderness holds true for both books. Kaplan's impressions are occasionally surface deep since he breezes in and out of towns in a matter of days or a couple of weeks. I have heard Kaplan argue that he feels that first impressions can be quite telling and that is true. However, the complexities of a community are sometimes deeper than the surface lets on. That having been said, Kaplan's prose is extremely interesting and readable. I think the scenarios he paints are quite plausible and the implications for individuals and policy makers are profound. I hghly recommend this book for anyone who is interested/concerned about what their communities will look like in the next decade.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

A bleak future of the nation state of America 16 Jun 1999

Mr. Kaplan's travels and views of the evolving future of the American West is acurate and sombering. It also applies to the rest of America. The book is pessimistic in that Kaplan beleives that the future as it is evolving is evitatable with rich enclaves amid a sea of poor cities resembling third world communities with uncontrollable emigration from Asia and South of the border. Is this what the presnt Americans want or should a stringent approach be taken to absorb the huge legal emigration of the last few years, vigorously inhibit illegal emigration, and seriously resrict additional emigraiton? This actually would mimic earlier waves of emigration. If we cannot control our borders and corporations better then we are doing, then we cannot control our future in becoming just another overpopulated disfunctional third world society.

America at the Turn of the Century 10 Dec 1998

Robert D. Kaplan presents an engaging view of the Americanwest and the closely related areas of British Columbia and Mexico. His journeys take him to such disparate places as St. Louis, Vicksburg, Kansas City, Vancouver, Mexico City, Los Angeles and the Oklahoma panhandle. In some ways the book provides further insights into trends previously chronicled in "Edge Cities," "The Nine Nations of North America" and "Ecotopia."

Kaplan provides one of the most succinct descriptions of the demise of St. Louis --- a city that has lost 60 percent of its population, which he concludes "no longer exists."

He provides a sympathetic description of the Oklahoma panhandle, constituting what may be the most comprehensive coverage of this geographical corner virtually unknown to most of the nation.

The book spends considerable time in discussing Arizona, its major cities and its native American preserves.

Kaplan finds that people in the emerging American communities, especially in the technology oriented edge cities, are likely to have much more in common with people they have only met through telecommunications than with their geographical neighbors, or people who live just a few miles away. In this regard, he correctly recognizes that the very meaning of community is undergoing a radical change.

The only significant problem is an uncritical acceptance of the Portland's purported land use planning success. Kaplan indicates that Portland has avoided the "unlimited growth" that has plagued other US cities. He further indicates that the cities of the Northwest (Vancouver and presumably Portland and Seattle) are devoid of sprawl. In fact, Portland sprawls at lower densities than Los Angeles and the central city of Portland is barely one-half to one-third as dense as the Orange County suburbs of Anaheim, Buena Park and Santa Ana. This mistake is often made by people who visit Portland's tiny but engaging core, while missing the other 99 percent of the urbanized area, which resembles Phoenix, though with more vegetation and more sprawl (less density).

With the noted exception the Kaplan book is important, useful and recommended as a thoughtful and apparently accurate assessment of US social trends as the 21st century approaches.

Wendell Cox
The Public Purpose