The Tragic Mind

Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power

By: Robert D. Kaplan

Narrated by: John Chancer

A moving meditation on recent geopolitical crises, viewed through the lens of ancient and modern tragedy

Some books emerge from a lifetime of hard-won knowledge. Robert D. Kaplan has learned, from a career spent reporting on wars, revolutions, and international politics in Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia, that the essence of geopolitics is tragedy. In The Tragic Mind, he employs the works of ancient Greek dramatists, Shakespeare, German philosophers, and the modern classics to explore the central subjects of international politics: order, disorder, rebellion, ambition, loyalty to family and state, violence, and the mistakes of power. The great dilemmas of international politics, he argues, are not posed by good versus evil—a clear and easy choice—but by contests of good versus good, where the choices are often searing, incompatible, and fraught with consequences. A deeply learned and deeply felt meditation on the importance of lived experience in conducting international relations, this is a book for everyone who wants a profound understanding of the tragic politics of our time.

©2023 Robert D. Kaplan (P)2023 Yale Press Audio

The recording is a redundant mess, repeating long passages sometimes several times.

Another brilliant book by Kaplan, providing foreign policy realism through elaborate references to literary classics. A minor tragedy is the production errors in this recording.

A book for our times

Poignant and insightful to leaders of times and on-going geopolitical tragedies. Required reading for those who seek power.

A Must Read to understand today's realities

Robert Kaplan is our generation's William Shirer as the eyewitness to the granular realities of our world. If reincarnation is real, Kaplan would have descended from Marco Polo.

Blending an exquisite interpretation of Greek myths and its fundamental human psyche with the 20th and 21st centuries' history, a superb conceptual framework is created.

The first third perfectly illustrates how and why our ideological isms have come to polarize our society.

Technical problems harm excellent book

This is a very good book but it suffers from technical glitches. Material repeats in several spots which took away from what should have been an excellent listening experience.

Once again brilliance and wisdom from Kaplan

He is the great wise thoughtful geopolitical writer of our time. Kaplan has done it again.