Earning the Rockies, Robert D. Kaplan
Earning the Rockies, Robert D. Kaplan
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Earning the Rockies
How Geography Shapes America's Role in the World

Author: Robert D. Kaplan

Narrator: William Dufris

Unabridged: 5 hr 21 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 01/24/2017

Synopsis

As a boy, Robert D. Kaplan listened to his truck-driver father's evocative stories about traveling across America as a young man, travels in which he learned to understand the country from a ground-level perspective. In Earning the Rockies, Kaplan undertakes his own cross-country journey to recapture an appreciation and understanding of American geography that is often lost in the jet age. The history of westward expansion is examined here in a new light—not just a story of genocide and individualism, but also of communalism and a respect for the limits of a water-starved terrain—to understand how settling the West shaped our national character, and how it should shape our foreign policy. In his clear-eyed and moving meditations on the American landscape, Kaplan lays bare the roots of American greatness—the fact that we are a nation, empire, and continent all at once—and how we must reexamine those roots, and understand our geography, in order to confront the challenging, anarchic world that Kaplan describes. Earning the Rockies is a short epic, a story both personal and global in scope.

About Robert D. Kaplan

Robert D. Kaplan is the author of over a dozen books on foreign affairs and travel, including Balkan Ghosts, Eastward to Tartary, and Warrior Politics. He is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington and a national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, and was recently the distinguished visiting professor in national security at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. Robert is a member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Jim on February 22, 2017

The author is a think tank guy in foreign affairs and he has 17 books on that topic and travel. In this book he looks inward to US history and geography and how “American exceptionalism,” due to our geographical richness and our history of westward expansion, has shaped our world view that leads us......more

Goodreads review by Macy on May 16, 2018

I wish there was some sort of device to count the number of times I yell profanities at an audiobook while I'm driving, because this book would be clocking in somewhere in the mid-hundreds. To say this book was a travelogue would be akin to saying that a version of the Golden Gate Bridge made accord......more

Goodreads review by Larry on August 02, 2017

Robert’s Kaplan’s EARNING THE ROCKIES: HOW GEOGRAPHY SHAPES AMERICAN’S ROLE IN THE WORLD is a work of geographical determinism. How could it be anything but that with a title like that.? But it’s still a very good book, and I think it makes a successful argument for why geography has determined Amer......more

Goodreads review by James on January 15, 2018

Robert Kaplan, a skilled writer with a wealth of global experience, falls victim to a sad parochialism in this book that seems to have been inspired by a narrow reading of Bernard DeVoto and Wallace Stegner, two prolific writers of the American scene. What we have with "Earning the Rockies" is a cas......more

Goodreads review by Caren on September 23, 2018

This book is the PBS Newshour/NY Times book club selection for this month, which is why I read it. The author is known for his idea that the geography of a country creates its destiny. In the course of traveling from east to west on a road trip across the USA in 2015, he muses on ways in which the d......more

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