Random House

Grand explanations of how to understand the complex twenty-first-century world have all fallen short -- until now. In The Second World, Parag Khanna takes readers on a thrilling global tour, one that shows how America’s dominant moment has been suddenly replaced by a geopolitical marketplace wherein the European Union and China compete with the United States to shape world order on their own terms.

This contest is hottest and most decisive in the Second World: pivotal regions in Eastern Europe, Central… more

Selected reviews of End of the Line are featured below:

Tuesday, August 16, 2005 The problem with globalized outsourcing, former Global Business executive editor Lynn warns, is that "a breakdown anywhere increasingly means a breakdown everywhere," as when a 2003 earthquake in Taiwan halted semiconductor manufacturing for a week, negatively affecting American electronics firms. National security, he argues, is jeopardized by this "hyperspecialized and hyper-rigid production system" as well; for Lynn, until the NAFTA-izing Bill Clinton came… more

Selected reviews of The City are featured below:

Tuesday, April 5, 2005 In gentle rebuke to those who never saw the good side of a city, urbanist and commentator Kotkin looks at the bright side, calling cities "humankind's greatest creation."

Cities concentrate not just people but also energy, talent, and wealth. Kotkin adds to these the element of sacredness: Ancient cities, he observes, were dominated by religious structures, suggesting "that the city was also a sacred… more

Selected reviews of Guiding Lights are featured below:

Saturday, January 15, 2005 This book documents the stories of 15 mentors as well as the very personal journey of a former Clinton speechwriter, journalist, and author (The Accidental Asian, 1998). Two years in the researching and writing, this is a riveting analytical description of how great teachers made a difference and how they work their magic. The 15 stories are as disparate as American lives:… more

Selected reviews of Warrior Politics are featured below:

Tuesday, January 15, 2002 Years of reporting from combat zones in Bosnia, Uganda, the Sudan, Sierra Leone, Pakistan, Ethiopia and Eritrea have convinced Kaplan (Balkan Ghosts, The Coming Anarchy) that Thucydides and Sun-Tzu are still right on the money when they wrote that war is not an aberration and that civilization can repress barbarism but cannot eradicate it.

Reminding readers that "The greater the disregard of history, the greater… more

Selected reviews of Eastward to Tartary are featured below:

Friday, December 15, 2000 President-elect George W. Bush could do a lot worse in preparing for the foreign affairs part of his job than to read "Eastward to Tartary" by Robert D. Kaplan, a scholarly and adventurous journalist who roams the less-traveled regions of the globe and writes about them knowledgeably and with sophistication. Mr. Kaplan is the author, among other books, of "Balkan Ghosts," which achieved… more

Selected reviews of The Coming Anarchy are featured below:

Sunday, March 19, 2000 There can be little doubt that Robert D. Kaplan is one of America's most engaging writers on contemporary international affairs. It is inevitable, then, that the appearance of a new book by such a prominent journalist -- even a book mostly made up of previously published essays -- ranks as not only a literary event but as one bound to… more