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Surrender or Starve: Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea Paperback – Nov. 11 2003

by Robert D. Kaplan (Author)
4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 43 ratings
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Robert D. Kaplan is one of our leading international journalists, someone who can explain the most complicated and volatile regions and show why they’re relevant to our world. In Surrender or Starve, Kaplan illuminates the fault lines in the Horn of Africa, which is emerging as a crucial region for America’s ongoing war on terrorism.

Reporting from Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Eritrea, Kaplan examines the factors behind the famine that ravaged the region in the 1980s, exploring the ethnic, religious, and class conflicts that are crucial for understanding the region today. He offers a new foreword and afterword that show how the nations have developed since the famine, and why this region will only grow more important to the United States. Wielding his trademark ability to blend on-the-ground reporting and cogent analysis, Robert D. Kaplan introduces us to a fascinating part of the world, one that it would behoove all of us to know more about.
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  1. Print length
    240 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Vintage
  4. Publication date
    Nov. 11 2003
  5. Dimensions
    13.18 x 1.52 x 20.32 cm
  6. ISBN-10
    1400034523
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1400034529
  8. See all details
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Review

“A writer of extraordinary intellect and passion . . .with a wonderfully lucid way of relating history as a living thing.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“This vivid account . . . tells very convincingly a story which the author claims was almost entirely ignored by Western media, diplomats, and relief officials. Kaplan paints a horrific picture of often fatal cruelty.” —Foreign Affairs

 “Robert Kaplan is a scholarly and adventurous journalist. . . . He draws attention to long-term trends that other writers have little noted.” —The New York Times
“Kaplan is a gritty travel reporter and commentator on foreign affairs known for providing no-nonsense political-historical overviews of the dicey places he visits.” —The Washington Post Book World

From the Back Cover

Robert D. Kaplan is one of our leading international journalists, someone who can explain the most complicated and volatile regions and show why they're relevant to our world. In Surrender or Starve, Kaplan illuminates the fault lines in the Horn of Africa, which is emerging as a crucial region for America's ongoing war on terrorism.
Reporting from Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Eritrea, Kaplan examines the factors behind the famine that ravaged the region in the 1980s, exploring the ethnic, religious, and class conflicts that are crucial for understanding the region today. He offers a new foreword and afterword that show how the nations have developed since the famine, and why this region will only grow more important to the United States. Wielding his trademark ability to blend on-the-ground reporting and cogent analysis, Robert D. Kaplan introduces us to a fascinating part of the world, one that it would behoove all of us to know more about.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; Reprint,Subsequent edition (Nov. 11 2003)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 240 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1400034523
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1400034529
  • Item weight ‏ : ‎ 239 g
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.18 x 1.52 x 20.32 cm
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 43 ratings

About the author

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Robert D. Kaplan

Robert D. Kaplan
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Robert David Kaplan (born June 23, 1952 in New York City) is an American author of many books on politics primarily foreign affairs and travel, whose work over three decades has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Republic, The National Interest, Foreign Affairs and The Wall Street Journal, among other newspapers and publications.

His more controversial essays about the nature of US power have spurred debate and criticism in academia, the media, and the highest levels of government. One of Kaplan's most influential articles include "The Coming Anarchy", published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1994. Critics of the article has compared it to Huntingon's Clash of Civilizations thesis, since Kaplan presents conflicts in the contemporary world as the struggle between primitivism and civilizations. Another frequent theme in Kaplan's work is the reemergence of cultural and historical tensions temporarily suspended during the Cold War.

From March 2008 to spring 2012, Kaplan was a Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, which he rejoined in 2015. Between 2012 and 2014, he was chief geopolitical analyst at Stratfor, a private global forecasting firm. In 2009, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates appointed Kaplan to the Defense Policy Board, a federal advisory committee to the United States Department of Defense. In 2011, Foreign Policy magazine named Kaplan as one of the world's "top 100 global thinkers."

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Rosalie Bolender [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

Customer reviews

4.2 out of 5 stars
4.2 out of 5
43 global ratings

Top reviews from Canada

D. Peter Humphrys
3.0 out of 5 stars The Eritrean long drive to independence in the Horn of Africa
Reviewed in Canada on March 26, 2017
This is an interesting book to read concerning the politics of famine, politics often being the key driver of famine, and I certainly came away with a more insightful picture of the region as regards Ethiopia and Eritrea (which eventually gained its independence from Ethiopia) but not really Sudan or Somalia.

Kaplan generally tends to hold to the storyline that the United States is generally good for the world, certainly better than the other actors on the international stage, so the reader should be forewarned of his bias (which is present in all of his books that I have read).

At times the book comes across as having been hastily composed and lacking a sharp eyed editor who should have caught the typos, omitted words, and incorrect grammar. Still an interesting read which might help one to think more clearly about the so called benefits of foreign aid among other issues.
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doomsdayer520
4.0 out of 5 stars True Knowledge from the Ground
Reviewed in Canada on December 28, 2003
This book details Kaplan's reporting from the African famine zones in the mid-1980s. While specific events are getting outdated, Kaplan does provide plenty of insight and realism about famine and power in Africa. This book mostly covers developments in Ethiopia, with important details on the separatist provinces of Tigre and Eritrea. Despite the book's subtitle, there is only some tangential coverage of Somalia as it related to events in Ethiopia at the time. Note that Somalia's well-publicized disasters hadn't happened yet. The same is true for coverage on Sudan, except for the latter parts of the book when obscure struggles in the inaccessible southern parts of the country caught Kaplan's attention. Also note that this new edition is supplemented with an enlightening update from the newly independent nation of Eritrea.
What matters most in this book in Kaplan's use of realism when interpreting events in the Horn of Africa, as he has done in all his other books covering various hellholes around the developing world. While the famines in the mid-80s shocked the world, most Western people (and governments) thought that drought was the unavoidable culprit. However, Kaplan proves through ground-level experience that the famines were really the outcome of murderous political policies, as food (and the withholding of it) was used as a weapon by the ruling regimes to control dissident groups, while never-ending civil wars and power politics impeded distribution of aid money and supplies.
Beware that this book nearly collapses in Part 4 as Kaplan analyzes the actions of the US and USSR when the Horn became embroiled in Cold War politics. Kaplan behaves like a Monday morning quarterback in criticizing the actions of both sides, with a rather bigheaded display of second-guessing toward the actions of international leaders, that only demonstrates Kaplan's unfair advantage of 20/20 hindsight. Fortunately, this problem (which also infects several of Kaplan's other books) does not sink this mostly powerful study of how ground-level knowledge from such Third World hot spots, and a truly realistic outlook, are the only ways to understand what's truly going on behind attention-grabbing stories of war and famine. [~doomsdayer520~]
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Victor Mroczka
2.0 out of 5 stars Not one of his best works
Reviewed in Canada on January 28, 2004
I was not particularly impressed with this book. Kaplan tend to repeat the same thoughts (and phrases) in each chapter. Obviously, he did not want to do much research into the area as the same handful of sources are referred to. It is a shame that such short shrift is given to this region as it is one continuously neglected by the popular media.
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Top reviews from other countries

Polarbear
5.0 out of 5 stars Great Book
Reviewed in the United States on October 25, 2013
Verified Purchase
I've been reading Kaplan for years. He has a unique way of exploring an issue or region of the world and bringing it home for the reader in a way that balances history, politics, and culture with a touch of the exotic. Kaplan also has a keep grasp of the world and where it is going. Reading Kaplan is always interesting, provocative, and thought-provoking. I would recommend any book he's written as a good read.

I must confess my ignorance about Ethiopia. I grew up with the commercials for starving children and famine relief and Live Aid, but I never actually knew much about it. I just figured it was another group of hungry people who were doomed by bad weather and bad geography. I never paid much attention to the issues of that part of the world, so I was shocked to learn just how much I had missed in my own lifetime in Ethiopia. Kaplan does a terrific job of explaining the background and bringing the issues to vivid life. This book is somewhat dated, but it still serves as a great description of what was happening in the region in the 1980s and 1990s and it helps shed light on the issues facing the region today.
4 people found this helpful
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Adrian J. Smith
5.0 out of 5 stars An impressive debut
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 15, 2012
Verified Purchase
As someone who has been a fan of Kaplan's work for sometime, it was a pleasure to finally read his first book, and a decent entry into the literary world it is.
Concerning mainly Ethiopia, and what would later become the separate country of Eritrea, we are given essentially a journey through history, as Kaplan recounts the long history of divisions in what was then Ethiopia, reaching back to Italian colonial intervention, up to the present, with the Soviet sponsored Dergue government.
What is revealed is quite a horrifying portrait, with hunger being used as a political tool by the Communist regime in Addis Ababa, and how conflict, political or ethnic, has taken the Horn of Africa into a nightmarish reality of Biblical scale.
Interesting insight is also contained with regard to Sudan, and the then conflict over Darfur. As someone who at first became familiar with Darfur in headlines starting from about 2003 onward, it was interesting to learn that this conflict is far from recent news, and was just as bad in the 1980s, however Western Media attention was elsewhere.
Despite being written in the 1980s, this book is still very much relevant, as it contains insight into the divisions, and factors exacerbating division, in this tumultuous region of the world.
2 people found this helpful
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Kenneth E. Mayer
4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting view of Africa in the 1980s
Reviewed in the United States on April 26, 2016
Verified Purchase
Kaplan has great books because he is on the ground, describing what he sees. This one would have been better if I would have read it years ago. Still, it is a good history of the region. You can tell it was one of the first books that he wrote. Sometimes you lose track of the people he is writing about. But overall, it is a good read, especially if you like his other books.
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Robert B
5.0 out of 5 stars Great read
Reviewed in the United States on September 24, 2022
Verified Purchase
I really loved this non-fiction story on the Horn of Africa. Kaplan took me on an unforgettable trip across the region.
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Amazon Customer
4.0 out of 5 stars I always enjoy reading Robert Kaplan
Reviewed in the United States on March 15, 2016
Verified Purchase
I always enjoy reading Robert Kaplan, so the book is a great tour of Africa. Even though the material is now somewhat dated, I am sure that the political and social contexts have not changed all that much in the intervening years. I recommend this like all Mr. Kaplan's other works highly.
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