Negative Positive
Title: Sobering and thought-provoking
Review: This is a great read - if you're an American, especially a liberal or progressive, it will really cause you to re-think the inherent bias we have toward "democracy" - through Kaplan's lens you begin to appreciate that building democracies takes a kind of social, economic and political evolution - you can't just arrive on the shores of a hungry, war-torn country and think that elections will save people - you can't define democracy by elections alone. And democracies need a middle class to be created and then to survive for a period of time. As one person stated, "Give us an economy first... then give us elections." A good read for these times.Also VERY interesting are his comments on the changing American social fabric - one where public life is being jettisoned by the middle class for a social and economic life that is private (malls, gated communities, corporations, edge cities dominated by corporate planning and architecture).
Is the review positive or negative? 