Random HouseProduct DescriptionAn incisive portrait of the American landscape that shows how geography continues to determine Americas role in the worldfrom the bestselling author of The Revenge of Geography?and Balkan Ghosts
As a boy Robert D. Kaplan listened to his truck-driver father tell evocative stories about traveling across America in his youth travels in which he learned to understand the country literally from the ground up. There was a specific phrase from Kaplans childhood that captured this perspective: A westward traveler must earn the Rockies by drivingnot flyingacross the flat Midwest and Great Plains.
In Earning the Rockies Kaplan undertakes his own cross-country journey to recapture an appreciation of American geography often lost in the jet age. Traveling west in the same direction as the pioneers Kaplan traverses a rich and varied landscape that remains the primary source of American power. Along the way he witnesses both prosperity and declineincreasingly cosmopolitan cities that thrive on globalization impoverished towns denuded by the loss of manufacturingand paints a bracingly clear picture of America today.
The history of westward expansion is examined here in a new light?as a story not just of genocide and individualism?? but also of communalism and a respect for the limits of a water-starved terrain?? a frontier experience that bent our national character toward pragmatism. Kaplan shows how the great midcentury works of geography and geopolitics by Bernard DeVoto?? Walter Prescott Webb?? and Wallace Stegner are more relevant today than ever before. Concluding his journey at Naval Base San Diego?? Kaplan looks out across the Pacific Ocean to the next frontier: China?? India