Rating: 
Summary: A Must Read!
Review: I will start with my one criticism of this book. It is incredibly short and pretty expensive for the amount of book you get. So recommend taking this book out of the library or waiting for the paperback. Enough said about this.This book and its essays are extremely important. As with his other works, Robert D. Kaplan has shown once again that he is right on the money about the problems in the post-cold war 3rd world. Or should I say the places in the world other than North America, the Pacific Rim, and Western Europe. Kaplan, like in his excellend "Ends of the Earth" has illustrated the effects of overpopulation, tribalism, crime, famine, and AIDS. He also writes a very interesting essay on Democracy. I also enjoyed his essay on Kissinger. The bottom line is this. This book is about some very real and very scary stuff. Kaplan who accurately warned the West about the breakup of the the former Yugoslavia in Balkan Ghosts, is again warning us of problems that can only spread and spread. Kaplan is a great writer and his warnings need to be listened too.
Rating:
Summary: Storm warning.
Review: THE COMING ANARCHY is a must-read for every world citizen. Kaplan is a journalist. His description of the state of the world is harrowing and accurate. It is impossible to argue with his thesis, that environmental exhaustion and resource depletion are the most powerful threats to both national and global security. I wish it were easier to close our eyes and hope that the house of cards stands as long as we do; but Kaplan defeats this possibility. We are stuck with our situation and must do our best to keep our leaky, overcrowded ship afloat. Kaplan should have paid tribute to Robert Theobald's 1967 classic eco-novela, TEG'S 1994, which presaged many of Kaplan's observations -- but perhaps it escaped his attention, being out of print. THE COMING ANARCHY is a surprisingly big book despite its relatively few pages.
Rating: 
Summary: Reality Based that is Disturbing and Provocative
Review: The Coming Anarchy should be required reading for every citizen who wants to think deeply about the dangers and realities of the emerging world. It would be particularly helpful for members of Congress and would-be advisers to the next President to read this disturbing and provocative work and ponder deeply its warnings about the dangers of human tendencies toward violence, selfishness, and self deception. There is a good bit I would quarrel with in Kaplan's work (and I suspect he would disagree vehemently with some of my positions). Yet there is an informed literate intelligence and an experienced reality based reporting that combine to create one of the most interesting critiques of political correctness , the Clinton Administration's trivial superficiality and the Congress's neglect of the changing world that I have encountered. Any book that cites Joseph Conrad's Nostromo, Sir Moses Finley's Politics in the Ancient World, Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Thomas Hobbes, Henry Kissinger's A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-1822, Pul Rahe's Republics Ancient and Modern and Latife Takin Berji Kristin : Tales from the Garbage Hills, is worth looking at. When that book is written by someone who has reported from Afghanistan, sub-Saharan Africa, Bosnia and Kossovo among other places it is a book worth reading. When he raises profound questions about the assumptions of both our conservative and liberal elites and paints vivid pictures of dangers unimagined by a peaceful society sheltered by decades of safety then it is a work worth thinking about long and hard. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in understanding the challenges we will face in the next thirty years.
Rating: 
Summary: Good Title, Good length, Bad Book
Review: The begining of this book is spent discussing the conditons of other nations, (how bad they are and how worse they will be). This is a problem because Mr. Kaplan provides no anylasis on how this will effect us, the average United States citizen. Therefore half way through the book you are asking yourself "why the hell do I care." Secondly, it is a book of combined works. Thus, jumping from one negative point of veiw to the next. Describing this hellish world of somewhat poltical unrest to come.It leaves the reader to make a connection(if any) between all the works combined. Lastly, Mr. Kaplan spends two chapters of this book on book reveiws and another prasing Henery Kissenger(Nixon's Secretary of State). Thus, these three chapters are wastes of space in a book only 185 pages long. That does not leave you much to enjoy. The book is choppy and filled with some info that could be vital to the reader if communicated effectively. The buy was not worth the little knowledge it had to offer.
Rating:
Summary: Pollyanna won't like this book
Review: The Coming Anarchy is a strong dose of realism. Much of what Kaplan predicts is already the case. Many of us work in buildings that are virtual fortresses, complete with security guards and high tech security systems. Many of us live in gated or quasi-gated communities, in homes that are a far, far cry from the homes of not so long ago where one could go out and leave the doors open. The trend towards bigger automobiles certainly suggests security concerns, and more and more people seem to be getting dogs as pets, dogs being fairly low maintenance security monitors. The Coming Anarchy turns the Pollyanna-ish idealized vision of the future shared by many boomer liberals upside down and inside out. Ironically, many boomer liberals already live as if the world is becoming a more dangerous place; remember "cocooning"? And yet they deny it. I have lived in several major U.S. cities and a few smaller towns throughout my life, and every single place I have ever lived has gotten worse, meaning more crowded, crime-ridden, commercialized, impersonal, and polluted by toxic substances in the air and water as well as by sounds which create a constant subliminal din, and lights that blot out the stars. I'd like to believe that the world is getting better and is headed towards some kind of globalized utopia, but reality keeps interrupting my fantasy. If you have a similar fantasy and are open to having it challenged, read this book.
Rating:
Summary: An Election Year Must Read!
Review: If I were a law and order candidate's campaign manager, I would be handing out free copies of Robert Kaplan's The Coming Anarchy to every prospective voter I could unearth. Framed against the recent back-lash of anti-police demonstrations in New York and the threats of Miami and Miami-Date County Mayors not to let their police protect Federal officials trying to return little Elian Gonsalez to his Cuban father, everyone should read Kaplan's vision of 21st century life so realistically put forth in this slim volume containing nine essays of which "The Coming Anarchy" is the first. A segment of the opening essay entitled "The Lies of Maymakers" voices Kaplan's healthy skepticism of maps and points out "cartography came into its own as a way of creating facts by ordering the way we look at the world." I could argue maps originated out of the need for an easily grasped way to direct someone from Point A to Point B, and were propagated by the military to accurately marshall their forces. Nevertheless, Kaplan's point cannot be denied. He aptly quotes poet Gary Snyder to the affect even the United States consists of "arbitary and inaccurate impositions on what is really here." Each of the other essays further buttress Kaplan's eye-opening appraisal of what lies ahead for us in the 21st century. Anyone who has ever visited an American embassy or even briefly crossed the border into Mexico or Canada and encountered raw bureauocracy at work will recognize the basic truth in Kaplan's premise. To punctuate it, Kaplan quotes Henry Kissinger from his A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-1822 (1952): "Liberty, after all, is inseparable from authority." In his essay "Kissinger, Metternich, and Realism," Kaplan cites the premise made by Henry Kissinger in A World Restored in which he credits the Austrian diplomat Prince Clemens von Metternick and British Foreign Secretary Viscount Robert Stewart Castlereagh with skillfully using diplomacy based on realism to keep Europe largely at peace from 1815 after Napoleon was defeated by the British at Waterloo until the beginning of World War I in 1914. (Kaplan might have also credited Lord Castlereagh's pragmatic approach to diplomacy with enabling the American team headed by John Quincy Adams and Albert Gallatin to finally successfully negotiate the Treaty of Ghent ending the War of 1812 which led to a protracted period of western expansion in America.) As Kaplan so aptly states in this collection's final essay - "The Dangers of Peace," "Avoiding tragedy requires a sense of it. . ." I therefore urge every thinking person to beg, borrow, or buy a copy of The Coming Anarchy - Shattering the Dreams of the Post-Cold War if only to read this last essay which has not been previously published. Understanding it will help keep civilization in place well into the 21st century.
Rating:
Summary: A Warning On The State of the Third World.
Review: Although I do not agree with the pessimism of Neo-Malthusians and end-of-history advocates, I found Robert Kaplan's new book an eloquent warning against apathy as we enter a new century. Kaplan correctly points out that the map of the world is deceiving. Most frontiers do not include or define nations based on a single ethnicity and/or religion, i.e., the essential cohesive force for a stable society is missing. Based on his travels around the Third World, the author observed that rapidly expanding populations, urbanization without adequate infrastructures and environmental disasters are causing the collapse of marginal states and their forcible integration into Yugoslavia-type states. Soaring populations and shrinking raw materials make democracy problematic and stability uncertain ,espcially, in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. Influenced by such writers as Huntington, Home-Dixon, van Gleveld, Rahe and others cited in the text - unfortunately there is no bibliography - Kaplan believes that homogeneous states such as Germany and Japan may not face the certain fragmentation of multiethnic societies, perhaps even the United States. Although the writing is uneven - the last third of the book consists of essays published previously - Kaplan does develop some interesting themes: Democratically elected regimes do not survive if the economy is not developed enough to prevent the return of authoritarian governments. Enlightened despotism is not preferable to democracy. The preferred alternative may be the middle for those countries which are trying to develop their economies without falling into anarchy. Like Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts, this book is a warning and perhaps a prohesy.
Rating: 
Summary: Read it at the library...
Review: Basically, if you already read ENDS OF THE EARTH, and AN EMPIRE WILDERNESS, you are better off reading this one in the library than spending the money on it. I've read most of Kaplan's books, and generally admire his writing and what he has to say, but I think his editors knew they could sell anything if packaged well with this one. A shocking title, and a slim book sell well, especially with Kaplan's name on it. Did it tell me anything new? Not too much. If I hadn't read his other works, I would probably admire this one more on its own as a singular production, but having read most of his other books I would say this is a poor effort because I know he can do better. I'd really like to see Kaplan immerse himself into a region (like he did with the Balkans) again and give us the dirt on it.
Rating:
Summary: Disturbing but Bracing
Review: This is a strong and realistic book. True, you will not find a detailed, balanced sociololgical treatise. But we shouldn't expect that kind of report from a journalist. What we do get in this book is the assurance of first-hand exposure to some of the planet's most serious areas of concern. Like Paul Kennedy's "Preparing for the 21sy Century," Kaplan's book blows away the myths of globalization optimism, painting a world that is coming square into contact with some hard ecological and demographic realities.
Rating:
Summary: Kaplan nails it again.
Review: I spent most of 1997 in Bavaria on a consulting contract. A friend I met while I was there who happened to be a Naval Intelligence Officer lent me Kaplan's "Balkan Ghosts". Like "Coming Anarchy" I literally could not put it down. But the absolute best-hands down "must read" is still going to be "Transfer-the end of the beginning" by Jerry Furland. Hard to top Kaplan, but hey read it and see.
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