As a guy, Robert D. Kaplan listened to his truck-driver father’s evocative stories about touring across America as a man, travels where he learned to understand the united states from a ground-level perspective. In Earning the Rockies, Kaplan undertakes his very own cross-country journey to recapture an understanding and understanding of American geography that’s often dropped in the aircraft age. The annals of westward extension is examined here in a fresh light-not only a tale of genocide and individualism, but also of communalism and a respect for the limitations of the water-starved terrain-to understand how settling the Western world shaped our nationwide character, and how it should shape our foreign policy. In his clear-eyed and shifting meditations for the American panorama, Kaplan lays bare the root base of American greatness-the truth 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 demanding, anarchic globe that Kaplan explains. Earning the Rockies is definitely a short epic, a tale both personal and global in scope.