Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Though I've read other Kaplan books, I cannot recommend this one. It's not clear what his intention was in moving to this slogging, plodding, at times incomprehensible writing style. It's also not clear what this book is supposed to be: is it history, geography, philosophy, political commentary, or simply (actually acutely, painfully, mind-numbing) his attempt to be all of the above in some fanciful mishmash of subject and style. Whatever his intention, the result is the worst I've experienced; and I've had my share of literary slogging. Where was his editor?? Through sheer force of will I sat down each day to plow through another chapter, finding each paragraph filled with unnecessary literary devices that added nothing to the subject, parsing sentences to try to discern his meaning (sometimes failing in frustration), shaking my in head in disbelief that I was spending more time unscrambling his writing than studying the subject. The book is more like a long research paper: collections of other historians' writings that are cut and pasted into narrative paragraphs. There is no new information, just a rephrasing of previous writings. Look at some maps, look in your college history book, and listen to the news: you'll know what's in this book. Throughout he references the writings of Mackinder, Morgenthau, Mahan, Spykman and numerous other historians, and even quotes other writers who have previously referred to those same historians. Historians quoting each other: quite the academic enterprise. A personal nit I have with Kaplan's style is that he falls for one of the cheap, pedantic devices of turning a proper noun into an adjective; for example, he could refer to his own work as Kaplanesque. There must be a dozen more natural ways that Kaplan could have concocted this sentence: "Sea power, it emerges, provides the Mahanian means by which a distant United States can influence Eurasisia in a Mackinderesque "closed system." In a later chapter he alternates between Iraq and Mesopotamia a dozen times over a few pages; an unnecessary distraction. Another irritating device Kaplan employs is using the words "even as" to link two concepts, both of which contain drawn out, overly stylistic descriptions which in some cases are difficult to relate to each other, nearly non sequiturs. Is this seven line sentence style really necessary: "Indeed, while the ..., with the ..., even as ..., especially in ..., leading to ..., the word 'Malthusian' will be heard more often." You'll find one of these on every other page. Unusual analogies can be found occasionally, too. Try this one: "Fourteen years elapsed from Athens's first foray into Sicily to its final disaster there in the naval battle of Syracuse in 413 B.C., the same number of years between the early forays of the John F. Kennedy administration in Vietnam and President Gerald Ford's final withdrawal after Saigon was overrun." That's simply hilarious. (Cue the Twilight Zone theme.) There's plenty more where this came from, but I'm getting a stomach cramp reliving the experience. On a positive note, the book highlights the extraordinary industrial and military developments underway by China, India and Turkey to prepare for their increased trade and natural resource movements in their parts of the world. While those countries are using technologies to overcome geography (maybe the book should be called "Surmounting Geography") and soon dominate commerce and sea power, the U.S. is doing nothing.