The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century.

AuthorBrooks, Geraldine

Robert D. Kaplan, Random House, $22 By Geraldine Brooks It's hard to think of a more eclectic journalist than Robert D. Kaplan, nor one who has so relentlessly followed his own interests into the earth's odd corners when the attention of the foreign policy establishment was elsewhere.

The subjects of Kaplan's books have ranged from starving Eritrean secessionists to embattled Afghan warriors to fat-cat Arabists of the U.S. State Department. Sometimes, his inquiries have proven stunningly influential, such as Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History. Kaplan began his inquiry into the historical roots of the Yugoslav crisis before the war, when the subject languished in the fogs of Foggy Bottom. By the time his book appeared in 1993, however, the thirst for understanding of the conflict was so strong that the Clintons and Colin Powell read the book avidly and allowed it to shape their thinking on involvement.

President Clinton is also said to have carried around a heavily underlined copy of Kaplan's 1994 Atlantic Monthly article "The Coming Anarchy," which is in many ways a distillation of the central thesis of his ambitious new book, The Ends of the Earth.

But if the historical determinism of Balkan Ghosts soured Clinton on Bosnian intervention and helped delay U.S. involvement, the policy implications of The Ends of the Earth are harder to extract and even harder to implement. Kaplan's long journey takes him along the coast of West Africa, down the Nile, across Turkey's Anatolian plain, through Iran and the emerging nations of Central Asia, briefly into Western China, and then on to Pakistan, India, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

In the first chapter, he admits that his journey was, in the end, too extensive to yield neat answers. "At the beginning of my journey, I was naive. I didn't yet know that answers vanish as one continues to travel, that there is only further complexity, that there are still more interrelationships and more questions."

Yet Kaplan does himself an injustice. He does fly home with some powerful observations and conclusions. They aren't packaged neatly in the final chapter, which reads a little as if Kaplan wrote it hastily, on deadline, in one of those reporter's moments of hair-tearing frustration when the computer search-key is malfunctioning, the index cards just blew out the window, and someone has tidied your notebooks so that you can't find anything.

Instead, the book's most enduring messages are seeded throughout...

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