Earning The Rockies - Robert D. Kaplan, Random House Books

A concise and deeply moving portrait of the American landscape from coast to coast, &quot,Earning the Rockies&quot, offers a detailed and pragmatic framework for our foreign policy by examining the specific geography from which American power springs.&amp,nbsp,As a boy, Robert D. Kaplan listened to his truck-driver father s evocative stories about traveling across America as a young man, travels in which he learned to understand the country from a ground-level perspective. In &quot,Earning the Rockies,&quot, Kaplan undertakes his own cross-country journey to recapture an appreciation and understanding of American geography that is often lost in the jet age. The history of westward expansion is examined here in a new light not just a story of genocide and individualism, but also of communalism and a respect for the limits of a water-starved terrain to understand how settling the West shaped our national character, and how it should shape our foreign policy. In his clear-eyed and moving meditations on the American landscape, Kaplan lays bare the roots of American greatness the fact that we are a nation, empire, and continent all at once and how we must reexamine those roots, and understand our geography, in order to confront the challenging, anarchic world that Kaplan describes. &quot,Earning the Rockies &quot,is a short epic, a story both personal and global in scope.&quot,