I'm scaring my entire household by having checked out or otherwise borrowed the last 10 books I want to read in my quest for 52. With this book complete, the end is in sight, though it may be difficult to get there!The Revenge of Geography just about completes my geography reading for the foreseeable future (see the last book post of the year when I get there for the actual last one). Most of the titles are fairly objective studies, but this one has a bit more of an ax to grind than those others. While not as wild as some of Orson Scott Card's crazy near-future speculative pieces tucked into the Enderverse, Robert Kaplan has some pretty strong beliefs about where to world is heading, and at least one of them will stymie/infuriate the reader. I was right there with him on the Russia thing (he basically saw the crisis in Ukraine two years before the Crimean annexation), and I was nodding along with his thoughts on Turkey and Iran and all of those countries in-between even though recent events shifted some of his theories a bit. He's not psychic, but was likely not shocked by the rise of ISIS (or whatever they want to be called now). I hung my head in shame when he said that those demanding an immediate pullout from Iraq and Afghanistan were being that way because they opposed intervention in the first place, not because they believed anything had been "won".
I did have to part ways with Kaplan on some of his thoughts on the US and Mexico. While not as frantic (and frankly racist/anti-Catholic) as Samuel Huntington, I can't really subscribe to his belief that northern Mexico and the southwestern US will merge by mid-century. His almost fearful attitude toward a potential Mexican "invasion" I felt was overblown and straight out of the playbook of groups like the Minutemen. At least he was hopeful that a healthier Mexico, along with Colombia, could form some kind of Western Hemisphere counterbalance to a united Europe.
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