Sonderbooks Book Review of The Coming Anarchy

****The Coming Anarchy*

Shattering the Dreams of the Post-cold War

by Robert D. Kaplan

Reviewed August 2001.
Available at Sembach Library (909.82 KAP).

This one was much harder reading, and when I was done, I wasn’t quite sure how to summarize it. Essentially, it’s a book about world affairs. It’s definitely a pessimistic book, but, again, it gives lots of food for thought. The chapters are essays originally published in The Atlantic Monthly, but all relate to world affairs.

The title essay was the most interesting. The author looks at the chaos in West Africa, where no government actually has control. He talks about factors that led to this situation, and why this may happen in many other parts of the world. He explains why many poor countries aren’t stable enough yet to support a democracy. If you give a democracy to a country where a large ethnic majority hates the ethnic minorities, you may be asking for trouble. (That’s an huge simplification of what he has to say.) Again, I recommend this book as something worth mulling over.

Book Reviews by Sondra Eklund

***The Coming Anarchy

Shattering the Dreams of the Post-cold War

by Robert D. Kaplan

****The Coming Anarchy*