As a boy, Robert D. Kaplan listened to his truck-driver father’s evocative stories about traveling across America as a young man, travels in which he learned to understand the country from a ground-level perspective. In Earning the Rockies, Kaplan undertakes his own cross-country journey to recapture an appreciation and understanding of American geography that is often lost in the jet age. The history of westward expansion is examined here in a new light-not just a story of genocide and individualism, but also of communalism and a respect for the limits of a water-starved terrain-to understand how settling the West shaped our national character, and how it should shape our foreign policy. In his clear-eyed and moving meditations on the American landscape, Kaplan lays bare the roots of American greatness-the fact that we are a nation, empire, and continent all at once-and how we must reexamine those roots, and understand our geography, in order to confront the challenging, anarchic world that Kaplan describes. Earning the Rockies is a short epic, a story both personal and global in scope
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Activities
- Book Group: Table for Two by Amor Towels, Oct 16, 2024 @ 2:00
- Book Club: Breaking Through by Katalin Karikó, Nov 13, 2024
- Book Club: Bttle of Ink & Ice by Darrell Hartman, Dec 11, 2024
- Current Affairs 2pm October 17,2024, Sunil Saksena will lead a Current Affairs discussion about India’s economy, its politics, the state of its democracy, its foreign policy and whether Washington’s growing friendship with India will yield the results it expects.
- Current Affairs, 2pm November 21st, Where do you get your news? Jim Cameron will review the latest online and print options and perhaps show you some new, credible resources for keeping up with local happenings.