Brought to my attention from reader Mikel, this review is posted on Amazon.com by former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. It is notable in that it shows how Kaplan defies simple political labels: he criticizes the Clinton Presidency and the GOP Congress, liberal and conservative partisans, but he’s not a cookie-cutter contrarian. His writing comes from a highly literate (and classical) education combined with real travel and reporting experience in more than 80 countries.

Newt Gingrich (Washington, DC United States)
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER) 4 of 5 Stars
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, Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and Thomas Hobbes, 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.

I second that recommendation—the Coming Anarchy book (and if you’re too cheap to purchase, at least the article) are required reading for understanding the post-Cold War world. (I hear the blog is pretty good too.)

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