Review of Robert Kaplan's The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the 21st Century (New York: Random House, 1996).
Intrepid traveler as he is, Robert D. Kaplan wrote his latest book, The Ends of the Earth, to report on an "unsentimental journey" through parts of West Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and Southeast Asia. His plan was to "see the present in terms of the future", thus folding "international studies into a travelogue." Ominous forebodings of nasty things to come haunted him throughout his trip, but he also came to recognize "that all my 'answers' might eventually be proven wrong." Perhaps so, but along the way he has interesting things to say about what it is like to travel by public conveyances and rub shoulders with ordinary, common people in some of the earth's poorest and most stressful human environments.
Kaplan sets the tone of the book in its very first words, as he reports on West Africa: "'The thieves are very violent here. . . .' warned the Liberian woman in fine, lilting English. Night had fallen. My protectress gripped my arm, then walked me to the hotel. . . . The little feet of a baby, wrapped snugly around her back, bobbed at her sides." The woman had fled from violence in her homeland to the comparative safety of the Ivory Coast, where, Kaplan informs us, no less than three-quarters of the capital city's inhabitants and half of the entire country's population have come from beyond the country's frontiers.
