
Earning the Rockies
How Geography Shapes America's Role in the World
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Narrated by:
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William Dufris
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By:
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Robert D. Kaplan
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 Earning the Rockies, 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. Earning the Rockies is a short epic, a story both personal and global in scope.
©2017 Robert D. Kaplan (P)2017 HighBridge, a division of Recorded BooksListeners also enjoyed...




















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Wistfulness of an accomplished author
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In the end it’s a book about American geography, it’s implications and it’s exceptionalism. Kaplan clearly has an agenda. As a realist/conservative he thinks America needs to be more attentive to its origins. He ties this to the frontier and American pragmatism.
Whether or not you agree with his arguments at the end of the book about what America should do in it’s international relations and foreign policy, the book is a thought-provoking analysis of who we are, how we got here, and where we will likely fall.
American Exceptionalism and it’s implications
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Nothing really groundbreaking
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Informative with a unique geographical perspective
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What was the most compelling aspect of this narrative?
I love even theoretical connections between geography and the course of history, and Kaplan loves to generate theories in this realmThought-provoking extended essay.
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Interesting but superficial
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Observations of a Traveler
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Fascinating.
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Magnificent book that found a great narrator!
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Liked the ending but only ties loosely to geography
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