AN EMPIRE WILDERNESS: Travels into America's Future.

• Author: Lessard, Suzannah
• Position: Review

AN EMPIRE WILDERNESS: Travels into America's Future by Robert D. Kaplan Random House, $27.50

Robert Kaplan is a vigorous reporter who thinks on his feet, often invoking historical perspective, but never staying still, always voraciously searching for the outlines of the furore in his restless travelogues, as he calls his works. They are really much more than that, but the form gives him room for wide-ranging references, for a certain casual associativeness, combined with the satisfaction of always moving on to something new. This is not to suggest that we have a lighthearted author here. An article that he wrote some years ago for The Atlantic Monthly, "The Culture of Anarchy", a terrifying description of the disintegration of culture and political order in Africa and Asia is said to have been a cult item among ambitious young neoconservatives in government in Washington, with issues handed around until they fell apart. Kaplan himself is in his late thirties, possibly beyond the reach of the adjective "young," and far too concerned for the fate of the weak and unlucky than is compatible with neoconservativism. But the popularity of his article, which could nestle nicely into the Book of the Apocalypse, was an eye opener as to the world view of upcoming generations. In the book that arose out of the article, The Ends of the Earth; A Journey at the Dawn of the 21st Century, he expanded his picture of impoverished, deracinated populations shifting about without hope in a degraded environment. A premise of that book was that our conventional maps, with their neat national boundaries and capital cities in bold lettering, are useless as descriptions of a world that more and more is reverting to ethnic alliances that are bounded by get graphical features. This quest to see through false maps to actuality--to the configuration of the future--makes The Ends of the Earth an exciting book, however gloomy.

An Empire Wilderness brings this same energy and commitment to America, and here, I have to say, I felt myself to be in a better position to judge what I was reading. I was struck first of all by the fact that though the material was drastically less alarming, the tone of pessimism was almost identical to that in The Ends of the Earth. Kaplan knows that to take on this new subject is to reveal himself. "To write about one's country is the most problematic form of autobiography," he writes in the...