Having read, enjoyed and profited from every one of Kaplan's books, I've recommended many and given several to valued friends. Kaplan has emerged as the best of a fine new breed of journalists, men and women who break out of the capital city circuit to bring us an up-close view of foreign realities. Often, those realities have conflicted with the comfortable diplomatic "wisdom," and Kaplan is unpopular with those who prefer an easy fantasy of mankind to the insistent, often-tragic reality. For my money, Kaplan is a national treasure, a clear-eyed, sure-voiced man of courage who takes risks to bring back an urgent vision of a world "globalizing" at a very uneven rate. And "Eastward to Tartary" is the finest of his many fine books. My only hesitation is in calling him a journalist, since he's so much more than that--he's a genuine strategic thinker whose vision consistently has proven more accurate than the work of any Washington think-tank drone or campus "expert," most of whom are as fearful of the people they wish to analyze as they are of the water from their hotel tap. Kaplan has an explorer's soul and a veteran soldier's eye for the lie of the ground. I have been to seven of the countries Kaplan discusses in this book, and I can attest that his eye is unerring. He has a gift for clear, literate prose that captures in a phrase what another writer could not get in a page. And he talks to everyone, not just to ambassadors and government mouthpieces. A man of boundless curiosity and as restless as Huckleberry Finn, his portraits of states and peoples from Eastern Europe to the Caucasus and down into the region long known as the Levant are timely and useful. What you read on these pages is exactly what is there in Georgia, or Turkey, or Lebanon. This book really is a remarkable achievement, for which my praise is insufficient. So, let me simply say this is a valuable, fascinating work that would reward readers on Capitol Hill, on Wall Street, or in Bisbee, Arizona: a wonderful, wonder-filled book!