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    Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America's Role in the World
    Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America's Role in the World
    Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America's Role in the World
    Audiobook5 hours

    Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America's Role in the World

    Written by Robert D. Kaplan

    Narrated by William Dufris

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    As a boy, Robert D. Kaplan listened to his truck-driver father's evocative stories about traveling across America as a young man, travels in which he learned to understand the country from a ground-level perspective. In Earning the Rockies, Kaplan undertakes his own cross-country journey to recapture an appreciation and understanding of American geography that is often lost in the jet age. The history of westward expansion is examined here in a new light-not just a story of genocide and individualism, but also of communalism and a respect for the limits of a water-starved terrain-to understand how settling the West shaped our national character, and how it should shape our foreign policy. In his clear-eyed and moving meditations on the American landscape, Kaplan lays bare the roots of American greatness-the fact that we are a nation, empire, and continent all at once-and how we must reexamine those roots, and understand our geography, in order to confront the challenging, anarchic world that Kaplan describes. Earning the Rockies is a short epic, a story both personal and global in scope.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateJan 24, 2017
    ISBN9781681684086
    Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America's Role in the World
    Author

    Robert D. Kaplan

    Robert D. Kaplan is the bestselling author of nineteen books on foreign affairs and travel translated into many languages, including The Good American, The Revenege of Geography, Asia’s Cauldron, Monsoon, The Coming Anarchy, and Balkan Ghosts. He holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. For three decades he reported on foreign affairs for The Atlantic. He was a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and the U.S. Navy’s Executive Panel. Foreign Policy magazine twice named him one of the world’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers.”

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    Reviews for Earning the Rockies

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      Conservative historian Robert Kaplan roadtripped across America to demonstrate the regionality of our history and geography, which both divide and unite the citizens of the US. He based his meditations on what he could observe, his experience and knowledge of the history of the regions, and overheard conversations in rest stops and cafes to understand what the so-called average person living in the area was discussing.I came away with an appreciation that the modern wealth of the country as shown by dollars, new ideas and even fine arts, is often concentrated in the cities along either ocean. However, even this wealth has been created by the vast farmlands, rivers and other natural resources, and secondarily the manufacturing centers that are now often in decline. It is this broad basis of geographical richness that has made the US the nation what it is – and now many of the heartland's fundamental areas of wealth-creation are the very geography and people that are unrecognized by the urban dwellers.I also enjoyed reading a viewpoint that often 'leaned right' as I unabashedly lean left.“There are miles of ribboned ground bearing corn and soybeans, punctuated by wide, circular metal silos. The native grasses and black earth alleviate the loneliness of the landscape, reminding you just how wealthy it is. Because this production and fecundity will go on for hundreds and hundreds of mile, both north and south and east and west, it constitutes the basis of continental wealth that, in turn, permits an approach to the world so ambitious – marked as it is every few decades by an epic, bloody disaster—that the human and material costs are easily absorbed by the very wealth and sheer size of the land that began it in the first place. It is these Illinois cornfields that ultimately allow elites in Washington to contemplate action even as others my suffer or be sustained by the consequences.” p 76.“Meanwhile, our expanding urban areas are becoming global city-states, with increasingly dense and meaningful connections with the outside world. But the weakness of global culture is that, having psychologically disconnected itself from any specific homeland, it has no terrain to defend or fight for,and therefore no anchoring beliefs beyond the latest fashion or media craze. So we unravel into the world. And the more disconnected we become from our territorial roots- the more urbanized and globalized we become- the greater the danger of artificially reconstructing American identity in more severe and ideological form, so that we risk radicalization at home.” 176-177It was a hard book for me to read, as Kaplan's style can be rather ponderous, and for me it was slow-going. Nevertheless, I found myself jotting down many quotes from the book. Here are a couple more:“The American narrative is morally unresolvable because the society that saved humanity in the great conflicts of the twentieth century was also a society built on enormous crimes – slavery and the extinction of the native inhabitants… History, though, can also be the story of ideas – and the more useful the idea, the greater the history. America’s was an anti-idea: philosophers generally know less than the masses, which, left alone to seek their own interests, often know best. Such democratic populism tempts narrow-mindedness, cruelty, and barbarism, and it cannot be successfully applied everywhere, even if Americans…believe otherwise.” (p. 42-43)“And what form does that conquest take now? It takes the form of trying to export our civic religion: representative democracy, human rights, rule of law, and so forth. But this assumes that no history anywhere matters except our own. It assumes that the very different historical experience of other peoples around the globe and the conclusions that they draw from them do not count. While democracy, human rights and the rest are self-evidently good, that doe not mean other peoples will arrive at them-or even variations of them- through the processes we demand. And this is to say nothing of the fact that such tenets as democracy and human rights are themselves not always in harmony:for in a number of places, minority rights are better protected by monarchies and dictatorships than by tyrannies of the majority or by outright chaos-which ill-conceived experiments in democracy often bring about.” p171I read this as part of the PBS/NYT Now Read This Book Club.
    • 4/5
      As a history and geography fan, I really enjoyed this book. I hadn’t thought about how the rivers in the US have helped to strengthen the country while the rivers in the USSR divided the country. I found the concept that if the US had been settled from the west to the east, our country might have different strengths and values.
    • 5/5
      I have always taken great pleasure in reading Robert Kaplan’s books, and this one was no exception. Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America's Role in the World is a look at American society through an east to west road trip. I enjoyed the thought-provoking insights Kaplan provides by weaving together geography, history, and socio-economics.
    • 3/5
      Book received from NetGalley.This was a good but not great read for me. I loved how the author talked about his father and how his father ended up being on of the reasons why Kaplan got the traveling bug. However, when he was explaining the books his father read and had him read and why they were also a part of it, the storytelling seemed to go off on a bit of a tangent and was a bit confusing for me. The best part of the book was Kaplan discussing parts of the United States that I haven't been to yet and are on my "bucket travel list", it made me want to buy a ticket and fly out so I could see the places and things he mentioned.
    • 5/5
      A rare 5. One of the best non-fiction and Kaplan books I have read and I've read them all. At once familiar and enlightening there were a number of those, yeah, that's exactly what I mean moiments and also a new and more positive view of the great unwashed in the "Heartland". This is why I read.
    • 4/5
      There are memoirs of road trips that are guaranteed to stand the test of time; Francis Parkman’s The Oregon Trail, John Steinbeck’s ‘Travels with Charlie’, Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’, Francis Parkman’s ‘The Oregon Trail’, and Ernesto Guevara’s ‘Motorcycle Diaries’ to name just a few. Robert D. Kaplan’s latest book describing his journey through the heartland of the United States in 2015 just as the primary season for the recent election was getting under way is probably not one of those. But in its own way, ‘Earning the Rockies: American Ground and the Fate of Empire’ is just as important a book. Kaplan took his trip during a defining moment in American history and through keen observations provided invaluable insights into the story behind the most mindboggling political upset in American history. Kaplan, inspired by his father’s tales of travel and the books of Harpers’ columnist Bernard DeVoto (Don’t worry. I hadn’t heard of him before either.), set out to find America by retracing a journey he took as a young man in 1970. This time, he sought to gain an understanding of how geography shapes America and makes us Americans who we are. In doing so, he linked his journey westward with that of America’s journey west over the centuries. Although ‘manifest destiny’ and ‘American exceptionalism’ are terms often heard in conjunction with discussions about f imperialism, Kaplan holds that the rigors of westward migration and the land itself forged and molded those who challenged the frontier and continue to shape and define them today. Kaplan’s journey began in the spring of 2015, just as the Republican primary with its vast herd of presidential wannabes was getting started. His strategy included spending a good deal of time in in restaurants and coffee shops, just listening to the conversations that swirled around him. His logic was that while people may adopt a pose when speaking with strangers in general and journalists in particular, they speak most openly when in the company of friends and family in a non-threatening environment. One thing that surprised him was that although the televisions were constantly blaring political and international news, these were seldom the topic of conversations. Talk was more likely to be about ‘work, family, health and sheer economic survival’. What was happening on the TV was just noise to them. The real drama was playing out right there in the room with them. As Kaplan pointed out, “Frontiers test ideologies like nothing else. There is no time for the theoretical…Idealized concepts have rarely taken firm root in America. People here are too busy making money — an extension of the frontier ethos, with its emphasis on practical initiative.” Perhaps even more than what he heard, Kaplan was deeply affected by what he saw as he crossed the country. Many cities and towns were dying. In cities like Wheeling, West Virginia, and even Springfield, the capitol if Illinois, one was more likely to encounter empty streets and boarded up shops than indications of a healthy economy. Cities that once housed a vibrant middle class now have only a struggling working class that is teetering on the brink of poverty. Automation and globalization have gutted the mining and manufacturing industries that many communities relied on for their economic existence. Kaplan also attributed this decline to what he called the growth of ‘flashy and sprawling city-states, often anchored to great universities’ such as Chicago, Austin, or Raleigh-Durham with its Research Triangle. These urban centers offered jobs and opportunities for young people and stripped places like Wheeling of any chance that an ambitious future generation will stay and turn things around. “I will not see very much of the middle class in my journey at all. This thing that the politicians love to talk about has already slipped from our grasp. I will encounter elegant people in designer restaurants and many, many others whose appearance indicates they have in some important ways just given up — even as they are everywhere unfailingly polite and have not, contrary to their appearance and my first impressions of them, lost their self-respect. The populist impulses apparent in the presidential campaign following my journey in early 2015 obviously emanate from the instability of their economic situation, suggesting the anger that resides just beneath the surface of their politeness."And this, more than anything else, is the crux of the issue when it comes to Donald Trump. Per Kaplan, "Trump represents a sort of antipolitics: a primal scream against the political elite for not connecting with people on the ground, and for insufficiently improving their lives. People trapped in their own worries as life becomes ever more complex, are simply alienated. And that alienation is registered in a taste for populist politicians." What is the value of preaching diversity to a community that has none, or trade deals to a town whose local market has closed because it couldn’t compete with a Wal-Mart thirty miles away? Much of the world that these people yearn for is gone and they know it isn’t coming back. But still if a politician comes to their town and says “I here you, and I am with you,” don’t you think that they will be tempted to believe in him, even if deep down they know better?For better or worse, the genie of globalism is out of the bottle. While there are many benefits to a global economy, there are also areas of concern. “ the weakness of global culture is that, having psychologically disconnected itself from any specific homeland, it has no terrain to defend or to fight for, and therefore no anchoring beliefs beyond the latest fashion or media craze. And so we unravel into the world. And the more disconnected we become from our territorial roots, the greater the danger of artificially restructuring American in more severe and ideological form, so that we risk radicalization at home. "Bottom line: Of all the books And articles that I have read recently in hopes of gaining an understanding of what the hell happened in November, this comes closest to giving me an answer. No, we are not a nation of racist misogynists. What we are is a nation of people who once in a while would like to believe that the powers that be are listening to us. If we believe that all politicians lie, then why not vote for the one whose lies tell us what we want to hear? Perhaps, as the saying goes, you really can fool all of the people some of the time.*Quotations are cited from an advanced reading copy and may not be the same as appears in the final published edition. The review was based on an advanced reading copy obtained at no cost from the publisher in exchange for an unbiased review. While this does take any ‘not worth what I paid for it’ statements out of my review, it otherwise has no impact on the content of my review.FYI: On a 5-point scale I assign stars based on my assessment of what the book needs in the way of improvements:*5 Stars – Nothing at all. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.*4 Stars – It could stand for a few tweaks here and there but it’s pretty good as it is.*3 Stars – A solid C grade. Some serious rewriting would be needed in order for this book to be considered great or memorable.*2 Stars – This book needs a lot of work. A good start would be to change the plot, the character development, the writing style and the ending. *1 Star - The only thing that would improve this book is a good bonfire.