Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America’s Role in the World Audiobook (Free)

As a youngster, Robert D. Kaplan listened to his truck-driver father’s evocative stories about touring across America as a man, travels where he learned to comprehend the country from a ground-level perspective. In Earning the Rockies, Kaplan undertakes his personal cross-country journey to recapture an understanding and knowledge of American geography that’s often dropped in the aircraft age. The history of westward enlargement is examined within a fresh light-not just a tale of genocide and individualism, but also of communalism and a respect for the limits of a water-starved terrain-to know how settling the Western shaped our national character, and how it should form our foreign plan. In his clear-eyed and shifting meditations in the American surroundings, Kaplan lays uncovered the root base of American greatness-the fact that we are a country, empire, and continent all at once-and how we must reexamine those origins, and understand our geography, to be able to confront the challenging, anarchic globe that Kaplan describes. Earning the Rockies is definitely a short epic, a tale both personal and global in scope.