Eastward to Tartary: Travels in the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus

by Robert D. Kaplan

Overview

Eastward to Tartary, Robert Kaplan's first book to focus on a single region since his bestselling Balkan Ghosts, introduces readers to an explosive and little-known part of the world destined to become a tinderbox of the future.

Kaplan takes us on a spellbinding journey into the heart of a volatile region, stretching from Hungary and Romania to the far shores of the oil-rich Caspian Sea. Through dramatic stories of unforgettable characters, Kaplan illuminates the tragic history of this unstable area that he describes as the new fault line between East and West. He ventures from Turkey, Syria, and Israel to the turbulent countries of the Caucasus, from the newly rich city of Baku to the deserts of Turkmenistan and the killing fields of Armenia. The result is must reading for anyone concerned about the state of our world in the decades to come.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780375705762
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/23/2001
Series:	Vintage Departures
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	5.16(w) x 7.91(h) x 0.85(d)

About the Author

Robert D. Kaplan is the bestselling author of twenty books on foreign affairs and travel translated into many languages, including Adriatic, The Good American, The Revenge of Geography, Asia’s Cauldron, Monsoon, The Coming Anarchy, and Balkan Ghosts. He holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. For three decades he reported on foreign affairs for The Atlantic. He was a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and the U.S. Navy’s Executive Panel. Foreign Policy magazine twice named him one of the world’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers.”

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Excerpted from "Eastward to Tartary"
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Copyright © 2001 Robert D. Kaplan.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

	Author's Note	xiii
Part I	The Balkans
1.	Rudolf Fischer, Cosmopolitan	3
2.	Heading East	12
3.	The Widening Chasm	18
4.	Third World Europe	29
5.	Balkan Realists	39
6.	Pivot State	49
7.	"Civilizational Choice"	58
8.	Wrestlers Versus Democrats	68
9.	The Legacy of Orthodoxy	78
10.	"To the City"	85
Part II	Turkey and Greater Syria
11.	The "Deep State"	93
12.	The "Corpse in Armour"	104
13.	The New Caliphate	115
14.	The Sacred and the Profane	126
15.	The Corporate Satellite	147
16.	The Caravan State	170
17.	Crossing the Jordan	184
18.	Sepphoris and the Renewal of Judaism	195
19.	Throbbing Heart of the Middle East	201
Part III	The Caucasus and Tartary
20.	To Turkey's Northeastern Border	213
21.	Stalin's Beautiful Homeland	220
22.	Fossil Nations	243
23.	From Tbilisi to Baku	256
24.	Imperial Collisions	265
25.	By Boat to Tartary	282
26.	New Khanates	286
27.	A Herodotean Landscape	303
	Epilogue: Hayastan
28	Earth, Fire, Water	311
	Acknowledgments	331
	Notes	335
	Index	349

What People are Saying About This

Jane Fletcher Geniesse

Writing in the glorious tradition of great Western travelers to the East in the last 150 years, Robert Kaplan belongs in the company of giants like Sir Richard Burton, Charles Montagu Doughty, and Dame Freya Stark. He is a national resource. Traveler, political observer, historian, modern-day Marco Polo, he reports with a novelist's flair on the Gordian knots of the future.
—author of Passionate Nomad: The Life of Freya Stark

David Landes

Kaplan is one of the two or three top travel writers of our day. He chooses important places (not merely pretty); he studies up on history, geography, and societies; and he tells wonderful stories about people. I'm a great believer in the power of anecdote, and Kaplan is a master of anecdote—not simply to entertain but to instruct. Even when I disagree, I come away wiser.
—author of The Wealth and Poverty of Nations

From the Publisher

"Erudite and intrepid... [Kaplan] is a deft guide to wherever he chooses to lead you."
—The New York Times Book Review

"Packed with provocative insights."
—Washington Monthly

"A graceful writer... Providing historical (and cultural and religious) context is what Kaplan does best."
—Los Angeles Times

Editorial Reviews

"Erudite and intrepid... [Kaplan] is a deft guide to wherever he chooses to lead you."
—The New York Times Book Review

"Packed with provocative insights."
—Washington Monthly

"A graceful writer... Providing historical (and cultural and religious) context is what Kaplan does best."
—Los Angeles Times

From the Publisher

In 1993, as the blood-letting in Yugoslavia's ethnic civil war entered its fifth year, Kaplan, a foreign correspondent, wrote a history of that tragic region that became an instant bestseller. The war and its elements of genocide paved the way for popular reception of Balkan Ghosts, but it is Kaplan's name that will secure readers for his newest travelogue. In many ways, this book is the sequel to Balkan Ghosts, telling the story of those other orphans of the Ottoman Empire--the lands of the Middle and Near East. Kaplan's intention is to introduce Tartary (known today as Central Asia) as a place that has more in common with the Western Balkan countries than with the Oriental images conjured up by its exotic name. Walking the streets of Baku in Azerbaijan, he sees images of the Romanian capital, Bucharest; both reside in the 100-year-old shadows of a cosmopolitan Ottoman boomtown, and in the more obvious decay and disenchantment that is the legacy of the shorter-lived Soviet empire. In relating his travels through Syria, Israel and Lebanon, Kaplan focuses less on the effects of communism and more on the way Turkey remains a historical link between Arab and European powers. Whether he is analyzing the basis for Turko-Israeli alliances or pondering the likelihood of an ethnic "Balkanization" of the Middle East, Kaplan is thinking in terms of a new "seismograph of world politics in the twenty-first century." His readers will be left with a rich supply of historic, geographic and cultural cross-references to apply when they read the news about some of today's most strategic hot spots. (Nov.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This perceptive travelog, which takes its title from journalist Kaplan's 11-country trip from the Balkans to "Tartary" (modern-day Turkmenistan), offers lyrical descriptions of the landscapes and insightful vignettes of uncommon clarity. As in his Balkan Ghosts, the author interprets present-day politics through the lens of "national character" and historical simile. In the earlier book, this approach yielded the often-discredited "ancient hatreds" thesis of conflict in the former Yugoslavia. Here Kaplan is more cautious, although he is likely to provoke controversy in asserting that Israel's right-wing parties "eerily resemble" the actions of Jewish zealots of the Roman era or that the Western promotion of democracy in the post-Soviet periphery amounts to an evasion, not a policy. Kaplan's strength lies in the quality of his interviews, which produce such surprises as the perceived importance of Israel's military alliance with Turkey. No single work can provide an understanding of so vast a political and cultural m lange, but Kaplan's book stimulates interest as few books can. Recommended for public and academic libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 7/00.] Zachary T. Irwin, Behrend Coll., Pennsylvania State Univ., Erie Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

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...This entire book is illuminated by an unillusioned intelligence and a steady sort of attention to deeper, longer-range trends rather than what might be called headline-news ephemera... If there is a better, more sophisticated and informed primer to the emerging powers and problems of the Greater Middle East, I don't know what it is.
—New York Times

Richard Bernstein