This reads more like a college textbook prepared by inexperienced professor who locked himself up in the university library for two years or so. I was disappointed as I liked Kaplan's earlier books, based on his actual visits to locations which are not accessible for most of us. Kaplan does menti...
The first part of this book is a nice review of major geo/political theories that I half-remembered from my intro level international politics classes. The second part is an examination of the geography of specific countries and regions (especially headline countries like Russia, China, and Iraq;...
This book was on the reader’s list before the terrorist attacks of 11September 2001; after those events however it seemed more imperative to read it. The book contains Kaplan’s typically superb reporting. While limited by the fact that it stops with the 1989 Soviet pullout, it nonetheless provi...
A West German doctor, Frank Pau-lin, traveled around Nangarhar province in April 1985, cutting off the limbs of mine victims with a survival knife. “Sometimes I'd use a saw, basically anything I could get my hands on,” he recollected. The only anesthetic that Paulin had available for his patients...
writes Joseph Conrad. “They are seas full of everyday, eloquent facts, such as islands, sand banks, reefs, swift and changeable currents—tangled facts that nevertheless speak to a seaman in clear and definite language.”1 The Pratas Islands, an atoll formed by three islands, only one of which is a...
protected as they were by mountains, deserts, and sheer distance.1 Of course, this protection was partial, for as we know, Greece was ravaged by Persia, China by the Mongols and the Turkic steppe people, and India by a surfeit of Muslim invaders. Nevertheless, geography provided enough of a barri...
Mughal emperor Akbar the Great marched into Ahmedabad in 1572 and completed the conquest of the province two years later. For the first time, the Mughals were rulers of a full-fledged coastal state with a substantial foothold on the Arabian Sea. Gujarat offered the Mughals not only possession of ...