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Title: Travels from hell and back
Review: This is the kind of travel you don't want to do. Yet, you have to be grateful a Westerner is daring enough to do it on your behalf for the sake of enhancing your awareness in the comfort of your home. His depiction of Africa and Central Asia are unforgetable if not almost terrifying.His specific analysis of Pakistan is fascinating, looking at 'social' factors and then the 'physical' factors. He borrows this social vs. natural factor analysis from Homer-Dixon.As mentioned above, a dimension to his writing, is Kaplan's quality as an "intellectual aggregator." He borrows material from tens of luminaries on various subjects. So, he rarely develops a theory in vacuum. He first aggregates different blocks of a political theory and then connects the dots between the blocks. He does that better than most. This makes for a very insightful and informative book.
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