We are rather naive in our outlook, we confess. We like to hold on to something as sacrosanct. But sadly much of what we held as above material motives is succumbing to the pressures of money. Academic scholars whom we respected were slowly revealed as caring far more about raising or making money than about the rigor of their scholarship. Almost every sector of American scholarship seems driven more and more by monetary pressures & attendant ego satisfaction than rigorous analysis. This week, our opinion of book reviews fell thanks to what we experienced from the largest trade book publisher in the world.
As our regular readers know by now, Robert Kaplan of Stratfor is one of our favorite authors. We have no hesitation or ego is acknowledging that we always learn something when we read his articles or books. He and his colleague, George Friedman, are always absolute must reads in our opinion.
And so was Kaplan’s book “Monsoon” as we wrote in three different review articles about it in 2010. It is a terrific book. It reveals Kaplan’s passion about the Indian Ocean. It also demonstrates Kaplan’s mastery of the geography and its ramifications on geopolitics. So our first two articles were glowing in praise about the book. Rasik we may be but we are never sycophants. We devoted our third review article to Kaplan’s major weakness, his lack of depth in history. We sent our reviews to Mr. Kaplan and received a warm reply. His publicist at Random House was also very happy with our reviews.
Two years later he published his “Revenge of Geography“. Once again we asked his publicist at Random House for a review copy. She responded immediately and sent us a copy. Our expectations of the book were too high and we found ourselves disappointed. So we titled our first review article Impressive Work, Unfulfilled Promise? Our second review article was positive about the book’s chapter on Afghanistan.
Our greatest disappointment was once again with Kaplan’s core weakness – his lack of knowledge of history, Indian history. Almost every European-American writer we know has learned Indian history from the British. Kaplan was more diligent. He had also researched some Portuguese work. Understand when the Portuguese & British came to India – the Mughal period when India was rich and famous for the opulence of the Mughal lifestyle. This was about 2-3 centuries after the Turko-Afghan & Uzbeki Mongols (Mughal) invaders had conquered North India. The British & Portuguese had no experience with the real India, the India built by Indian culture & philosophy, the India that lives to this day via the Maha-Bharat & the Ramayan.
We were more charitable to Mr. Kaplan during Monsoon reviews and his historical treatment in the Monsoon was as an aside. His discussion on Indian history was central to his case in the Revenge of Geography. And it was abominably ignorant & stupidly prejudiced. But our respect for Mr. Kaplan is so high that we attributed his ignorance to his programming by British & Portuguese colonial writers and not to any defect in him. We still maintain that view. That is why we titled our frank and candid review article as Depressing Evidence of a Programmed Mind.
As in the case of Monsoon, we sent our reviews of Revenge of Geography to both Mr. Kaplan and his publicist at Penguin Random House. Neither responded. So we guess they were not pleased. But how angry were they?
We learned that last week when we sent in our request for a review copy of Kaplan’s new book “Asia’s Cauldron“. All we got this time was cold silence. We guess they think book reviews are only meant to be positive.
This is what we have called a positive feedback loop , a standard operating practice in journalism and publishing. As we wrote in March 2013, journalists seek quotes from pliable “scholars” who willingly supply the quotes the way journalists want and in return the “scholars” get their names included in elite newspapers. The attendant payoff is not just publicity but the opportunity to get their books published by publishers who want authors branded as acceptable by elite newspapers. As we wrote, a positive mention by Tom Friedman of the New York Times is a ticket to get an Indian author’s book published by a Penguin Random House type western publisher.
We don’t play that game. Our educational training is in Mathematics and our vocation is Global Macro. Both are utterly rigorous and brutally distinguish between right & wrong and between insight & superficiality. So the behavior of Kaplan’s publicist doesn’t and will not change what we think, write or do in the slightest.
We will review his new book “Asia’s Cauldron” with the same rigor as we employed in our reviews of “Monsoon” and “Revenge of Geography”. Our first impression is that this is a book that falls between his two earlier books in both reach and success. It is also a much simpler book with more information than insight. And we think we are likely to describe it as another “must read” book from Robert Kaplan.
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