Books for late summer: from genius genes to tyrannosaur musings

Science News,  August 5, 2006  by J.A. Miller

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A Journey through the World's Backwaters THE ENDS OF THE EARTH

ROBERT D. KAPLAN Random House, 1996

It's nice to know that someone is willing to investigate down-and-dirty parts of the world that most of us would rather not set foot in.

In The Ends of the Earth, Robert D. Kaplan explores what he calls "the coming anarchy"--a collision course of population growth, tribal disputes, disease, crime, and environmental degradation in the developing world.

Ten years after its publication, the book remains a vivid lesson in human geography. It reads like an adventure story, riddled with interviews of corrupt local officials, cynical expatriates, and smugglers--plus tidy doses of history to carry the reader through. Kaplan provides a smooth read and context for today's unsettling headlines from faraway places.

Kaplan does his reporting the old-fashioned way, hopscotching across West Africa, the Middle East, and Asia with a notebook. He finds that cultural animus has supplanted national identity in many countries whose people--cut loose by the end of lucrative Cold War alliances--find themselves living hand-to-mouth.

The desperation is often palpable. Riding in a taxi in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, Kaplan finds his view suddenly blocked by a dozen hands on the windows as the car pulls up to a bus station. Young men "yanked open the door and demanded money for carrying my luggage a few feet to the bus, even though I had only a light rucksack. I was to find youths like these throughout urban West Africa: out of school, unemployed, loose molecules in an unstable social fluid that threatened to ignite," he writes.

Yet amid garbage and buzzing flies in Conakry, Guinea, Kaplan sees hope. He locks eyes with "a miraculously healthy-looking teenager" standing near a zinc-roofed shack. "To thrive in this miasma, merely to survive, indicated a vitality that I would never be able to muster," he says. "I smiled back at what I knew to be my genetic superior."

As some countries endure a daily struggle, others try to recover from the past. In the streets of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Kaplan notices dozens of amputees--victims of land mines. In the mid-1990s, that country still had about 10 million mines in the ground left over from civil wars. It's an economic problem: A land mine costs less than $4 to install, but hundreds of dollars to remove.

Fortunately, Kaplan in his travels found some good news to temper the bad. His impression of Turkey is refreshing. Entering a shantytown built into a steep hillside of Ankara, Kaplan finds not a slum but a stacked, middle-class neighborhood: "The architectural bedlam of cinder and sheet metal and cardboard walls was deceiving. Inside was a home. I saw a working refrigerator, a television.... The other homes were like this, too." He writes, "Crime was infinitesimal."

In the region of the former Soviet Union between Iran and Russia, Kaplan picks his way through nations with irrational borders and that lack a clear national identity. Those areas are predominately populated by people of Turkie race who speak Persian languages and practice Islam, a religion that began in Arabia.