Kaplan, the realist, has elsewhere defined his realism as "an unrelenting record of uncomfortable truths. Vietnam is the war he's described as a "mire," a "mistake" and "a disaster.". He meets a Filipino and observes: "His smiling, na?ve eyes cried out for what we in the West call colonialism." He chastises the "elite" for casting Vietnam in a bad light the soldiers consider that war "every bit as sanctified as the nation's others." The longtime Kaplan reader pulls out the older books. But here he's on a trip to utopia, and what emerges are surprising opinions. Like many writers and houseguests, Kaplan needs an argument to get his best juices flowing. "I wanted a visual sense of the socioeconomic stew in which Al Qaeda flourished." You smile in admiration, as at something rare, like a triple play it's a double mixed metaphor. Kaplan keeps getting into scrapes at the keyboard. There would be no time for the steak and shrimp dinner that had been prepared." And it's a shame such well-traveled eyes are welded between numb ears: Details are "grisly," murders are "gruesome" you hear "faint" echoes but "shrill" cries "chiseled" bodies cross "manicured" landscapes troops become "hardened," resemblances grow "uncanny." Kaplan is trying for fine writing - literary special effects - but he doesn't resist the old grooves, and if a writer can't avoid stock expression, it suggests imprisonment at the conceptional level. "Who here was Al Qaeda? I asked myself, licking my fingers after devouring a greasy chicken in a sidewalk restaurant filled with armed youngsters." The next one is my favorite: "We were suddenly going out on a nighttime hit of a compound just outside Gardez. Kaplan's got both his hats on at the same time, and the travel writer (who likes flavors and vistas) keeps barging in. The good parts: he book goes to pieces immediately. Kaplan's latest book, Imperial Grunts - and, by extension, Kaplan's entire body of work. In today's New York Times Book Review, Lipsky does a number on Robert D. According to numerous accounts, Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts and its "ancient hatreds" thesis convinced Bill Clinton not to intervene in Bosnia during the earlier years of his presidency. O'Rourke had given up writing to entertain and instead tried writing for policy elites - and then those policy elites actually took him seriously.
Kaplan has my dream job, a bewitching m?lange of travel writer and analyst of world politics.
I fear that part of this is born out of petty jealousy. With the exception of a lovely Atlantic profile of Sam Huntngton, I've never really cared for most of Robert D.
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