The ends of the earth - Robert D. Kaplan

In The Ends of the Earth, Robert D. Kaplan travels from the devastated countries of West Africa and the fundamentalist enclaves of Egypt and Iran to the culturally explosive lands of Central Asia, India, Pakistan and Southeast Asia with hardly more than a notebook and a backpack. It is a travel book whose models are the works of Freya Stark and the Victorian explorers; its observations are shrewd, provocative and chilling, and it is in people’s daily existence, fears, frustrations and dreams that he looks for the key to a country’s future.

The Ends of the Earth offers an intimate portrait of the devastated parts of the world, whose cultural disasters—like those in Bosnia, Chechnya and Rwanda today—will dominate our attention and remake the world of tomorrow.