Mediterranean Winter:
The Pleasures of History and Landscape in Tunisia, Sicily, Dalmatia, and Greece
Robert D. Kaplan, Random House, 256 pages, $37.95.
"Travel is most rewarding when you are young, before a career takes hold," Robert D. Kaplan writes halfway through this account of his youthful wanderings through Northern Africa and Southern Europe.
A career, and the solemn sense of responsibility that goes with it, inevitably means far less careering through the off-season Mediterranean landscapes that the younger Kaplan found so rewarding.
Now best-known as a geopolitical analyst for The Atlantic Monthly -- and what could be more solemn and more purposeful than that? -- the introspective Kaplan was a budding foreign correspondent when he first set himself loose in Europe as the Vietnam War was coming to a painful end.
In these mature, or at least middle-aged, recollections of his quest, he shies away from personal detail. As he pokes around the much-contested island of Sicily, we hear much more secondhand Thucydides than firsthand Kaplan, and savour the anxieties of ancient Greek alliances more powerfully than the smells and tastes of a modern Sicilian city.
That is exactly what Kaplan intends. Having witnessed many of the modern world's tribal and religious conflicts over the past three decades, he senses that history is at the heart of human experience. And so in Mediterranean Winter, the olive groves of Tunisia become less a destination in themselves than the setting for ruminations on the power politics of Carthage.
There are times you wish that Kaplan were truer to his younger self, that he could set aside the big-picture view of the warring world and focus more innocently on the humble details of the day-to-day traveller. For readers not determined to compare and contrast ancient Rome with modern America, his history lessons can feel trite and simplified, whereas his more random observations -- Of noisy nomads: "The ceaseless wind had given them the habit of talking loud" -- have the ring of deeper truths.
