Having spent more than two decades reporting on ethnic strife and political upheaval in far-flung regions of the world, Kaplan (Balkan Ghosts), turns to his own backyard, trekking across the American West, Mexico and western Canada to map out America's shifting socio-political landscape at the turn of the millennium. The nation, he argues, is losing its identity as one union and splintering, like the Balkanized areas of the globe that have long captivated Kaplan, into a mosaic of different regions with sometimes conflicting cultural identities. In crossing the American Plains and Rocky Mountains, Kaplan sees the growth of city-states and the growing income gap as leading to class-stratified, post-urban pods, in which government does little to improve the living conditions of the poor. The rising Hispanic population in the Southwest has fostered "binational" cities, he says, while the shared interests of America's Pacific Northwest and British Columbia is creating Cascadia, a self-contained region predicated on the eventual breakup of Canada. Kaplan's fluid, razor-sharp travelogue is peppered with references?to Gibbon, the Founding Fathers, ancient Greek and Civil War history?and powerful descriptions of the landscape (a Greyhound bus in New Mexico is "a prison van transporting people from one urban poverty zone to another"; the Arizona desert resembles "the glazed surface of a red earthen jar"; the Pacific Northwest "a magical frontier" of "brooding cathedral-dark forests" and place-names suggesting "an icy clean, mathematical perfection"). As dystopian as it is soberly prescient, Kaplan's vision of 21st-century America will command the attention of readers from all corners of our increasingly decentralized continent. Editor, Jason Epstein; agent, Brandt & Brandt.

Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

罗伯特·D. 卡普兰（Robert D. Kaplan，1952— ）美国著名地缘政治专家，18本外交政策和游记类畅销书作者，《大西洋月刊》资深主笔、知名记者，美国安全中心高级研究员，欧亚集团高级参谋。他两度被《外交政策》评为“全球100位顶尖思想者”之一 ，其作品影响了克林顿和小布什两位美国总统的军事决策。

卡普兰游历了近70个国家，对世界政治局势和地缘政治深有体会，擅长运用游记的写作手法处理新闻和政治议题，其作品兼具文学性与地缘政治分析的严肃性，他与弗朗西斯•福山、保罗•肯尼迪和塞缪尔•亨廷顿并称“被最广泛阅读的描绘后冷战世界的作家”。卡普兰最具影响力的著作《无政府时代的来临》被评价为足以与塞缪尔·亨廷顿《文明的冲突》相媲美的经典作品。其代表作另有《巴尔干的幽魂》《季风：印度洋与美国权力的未来》《即将到来的地缘战争》《世界的尽头》《东进鞑靼》《回到马可·波罗的世界》《成败落基山》等。

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译者 何泳杉，浙江大学国际文化系学士，加拿大麦克马斯特大学宗教系硕士，现旅居加拿大，在多伦多从事记者工作。译有《为佛而燃：古代中国的烧身研究》、《伦敦传》（合译）等。