Descrizione
Today more than ever, the history of the Middle East is that of the entire world and every reflection concerning it, however indirect, reveals itself to be a mirror of our civilization.
To glimpse the future through the past, Robert Kaplan returns to the genre most congenial to his way of living and telling geography: travel and reportage, understood as “the art of overcoming the first impression”.
The subject of this new adventure is the Greater Middle East, or, in a broad sense, the Islamic region of desert and plains, the vast area that goes from Morocco to East Turkestan, up to the edge of China; from the Balkans to Yemen; from the reality of Libya to that of Afghanistan. Between discoveries and memories, the narrative unfolds along Egypt, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran. Mixing the memories of his many explorations with the readings of experts, historians and writers, Kaplan evokes eras and landscapes, moving nimbly between complex local realities, strong in a single certainty: “crossing a country, smelling its smells, watching how people behave, does not offer definitive answers, but it helps. It allows you to touch the ground with your own hands, so as not to let real places dissolve and become abstract.”
This gaze proves fruitful, capable of reflecting on events and scenarios, millennia and dynasties, chaos and empires, without exhausting but multiplying the questions: “What direction will the course of things take? What political dimensions will this vast region that occupies a large part of the subtropical belt between Europe and the Far East assumes? Will it succeed in extricating itself from decades of instability and misgovernment and finding a compromise between tyranny on the one hand and anarchy on the other?”.
