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Earning the Rockies by Robert D. Kaplan
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Earning the Rockies

How Geography Shapes America's Role in the World

$26.24

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Narrator William Dufris

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Length 5 hours 21 minutes
Language English
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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.

Robert D. Kaplan is the author of over a dozen books on foreign affairs and travel, including Balkan Ghosts, Eastward to Tartary, and Warrior Politics. He is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington and a national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, and was recently the distinguished visiting professor in national security at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. Robert is a member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board.

William Dufris began his audio career doing radio plays, audiobooks, film/animation dubbing, and language tapes in London, where he lived for thirteen years. While there, he had the honor of sharing the microphone in a number of BBC Radio plays with Kathleen Turner, Sharon Gless, Stockard Channing, and Helena Bonham-Carter. These experiences led him to cofound two audio production companies: The Story Circle Ltd. and Mind's Eye Productions. He has also acted on stage and television in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany. William is the original voice of Bob (and Farmer Pickles/Mr. Beasley/Mr. Sabatini) in the popular children's show Bob the Builder for the United States and Canada (Series 1-9). He produces, directs, acts and engineers for his audio theatre company, Rocky Coast Radio Theatre. He has been nominated nine times as a finalist for the APA's prestigious Audie Award and has garnered twenty-one Earphones Awards from AudioFile magazine, which also named him one of the Best Voices at the End of the Century, as well as one of the Best Voices of the Year in 2008 and 2009.

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Shop the sale

In celebration of Independent Bookstore Day, shop our limited-time sale on bestselling audiobooks from April 22nd-28th. Don’t miss out—purchases support your local bookstore!

Shop now
Celebrate indie bookstores with our limited-time sale! Shop the sale