The 1990s: Remember them? The decade began with the collapse of the Soviet Union. It ended with the Dow bursting past the 10,000 mark. In between, we got victory in the gulf, the creation of the European Union and the World Trade Organization, NATO enlargement, an American budget surplus, peace in Northern Ireland, Google, victory in the Balkans and (Charles Barkley aside) a world firmly united in wanting to be “like Mike.”To get more book reviews, you can visit shine news official website.

Or so they seemed. In 1994, Robert D. Kaplan, a foreign correspondent who had cut his teeth covering the Balkans, the Iran-Iraq war and the famine in Ethiopia, wrote an influential essay in The Atlantic warning of “The Coming Anarchy.” If, as Francis Fukuyama thought, we had entered a “posthistorical” era of bourgeois comfort and democratic legitimacy, it was an era whose bounties relatively few shared. The rest, Kaplan wrote, “will be stuck in history, living in shantytowns where attempts to rise above poverty, cultural dysfunction and ethnic strife will be doomed by a lack of water to drink, soil to till and space to survive in.”

History has not vindicated every aspect of Kaplan’s thesis — Pakistan and India, for instance, haven’t fallen apart, despite the essay’s suggestion that they might, and most measures of human welfare continue to show progress. But his general pessimism about the world that lay in wait in the 21st century now looks remarkably prescient, at least next to the Pollyannaish forecasts of techno-optimists, democracy promoters and globalization enthusiasts.

That’s reason to welcome “The Return of Marco Polo’s World,” an eclectic collection of elegant and humane essays, all but one of which previously appeared in The Atlantic and other publications over the past dozen or so years. Kaplan’s interests run wide: the ethnic tangles of Central Asia; the political thought of Samuel Huntington; the unsung heroism of Medal of Honor winners; the prospect of war on the Korean Peninsula. Above all there is his fascination with the decisive impact of geography on the calculations, ambitions and illusions of statesmen and societies.Take the Mediterranean. For half a millennium, it mostly separated not only two continents but also two civilizations: Christendom and Islam. Yet the collapse of political order throughout much of the Maghreb has reminded millions of Africans that the Middle Sea isn’t so wide after all. Thousands have drowned trying to cross it; many more have succeeded, with cumulative effects on what we used to think of as European society.