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Surrender or Starve: Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea | 
 enlarge | Author: Robert D. Kaplan
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $13.95
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Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 376759
Media: Paperback
Edition: Rep Sub
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 240
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5.3 x 1.7
ISBN: 1400034523
Dewey Decimal Number: 963.07
EAN: 9781400034529
ASIN: 1400034523
Publication Date: November 11, 2003
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Product Description
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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| Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...
 Atypical for Kaplan October 27, 2007
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
Surrender or Starve is a solid book that deserves reading, especially if you knew nothing of the Ethiopian/Eritrean conflict. When I was young, I distinctly recall images of the famine in Ethiopia, calls to action from within the United States but, like Kaplan emphasizes, the West did not appreciate the true root cause of these problems: ethnic conflict. At the very least, I was ignorant of these factors. Kaplan made me investigate deeper and in doing so, I found a lot of interesting material on the Internet. One mild example of the two countries animosity of one another was found when I was looking for a good Ethiopian or Eritrean restaurant in NYC. I found one, incidentally, and the food is different but good--first time for Ethiopian for me. At any rate, a listing of Eritrean restaurants on an Eritrean-American website showed several but apparently 2-3 were "bought by an Ethiopian" and were blocked out with those words bolded in red. I guess for the time being with the struggle still fresh in everyone's memory (and likely to ignite again), it's not appropriate to patronize your enemy.
more relevant than ever January 17, 2007
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
I have enjoyed reading a half-dozen books by Robert Kaplan, a journalist who writes about foreign affairs for the Atlantic Monthly, and this one was no exception. Although some critics consider Kaplan's analyses as overly pessimistic, most give him high praise for his skill in combining first person travel narrative, history, geo-political analysis, and a street-level view of what is unfolding in the farthest corners of our world. Surrender or Starve was first published in 1988, right after the epic famines that devastated the Horn of Africa from 1984-1987; this new edition includes a new foreword and a postscript on Eritrea (which declared independence from Ethiopia in 1991 after a thirty-year war).
Kaplan is an unapologetically opinionated writer. Most of the media covered the famines that devastated eastern Africa as caused by horrible droughts, which is partly true. But Kaplan insists that Africans, and not only God, were also to blame, because the famines were greatly exacerbated by ethnic conflict and class warfare. In Sudan, the northern Muslim government in Khartoum ignored the plight of Christians in the south. In Ethiopia, the ruthless Marxist regime of Mengistu Hailie Mariam (1977-1991) turned the famine into a weapon of war against the ethnic Oromos, Tigreans and Eritreans. Massive "villagization" or forced collectivizations that displaced five million people were hailed by Mengistu as "famine relief." In 1986, for example, the World Human Rights Guide "gave Ethiopia the lowest rating of any country in the world" (p. 81). Today Ethiopia remains one of the poorest countries in the world. What makes Kaplan such an engaging writer is his stated intention to think and write about Africa in "a bold, unpopular, but more realistic way, judging Africa by the same standards of moral conduct that would apply to any other part of the globe" (p. xii). Characteristic of all his books, Kaplan thus places himself squarely in the tradition of realpolitik as opposed to all forms of political idealism.
The crimes of Mengistu and the Dergue. August 8, 2006
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
This book is almost completely about how the Communist government of Ethiopia misled the West into thinking that a small harvest was the reason for the mass starvation of 1984. Most remember this as the time when the charitable West stepped in with huge donations of grain and musician celebrities formed to perfom Band Aid. It is bad because the main culprit was the dictator Mengistu and his Communist buddies doing forced resettlement, collectivization, and centralized villages. They wanted to win the civil war raging in Ethiopia and install a Marxist government. Millions died, the Hollywood establishment blamed bad weather, and leftists told the West they weren't doing enough. Well the Ethiopian government could have stopped the genocide by stopping its failed policies.
This is an eye awakening book about how the West was deceived by a Marxist Third World government. There is some material in the book about Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen but the main focus is Ethiopia. The fallen Ethiopian government failed the people it governed.
 Robert kaplan need more research February 25, 2006
6 out of 12 found this review helpful
The book takes a view of one side approach. I lived in Ethiopia in the 1980's and most of the staff Mr. Kaplan talked about never happened. The historical facts are missing. Emperor Menelik was not the first Amhara king there was Emperor Tewdros form Gojam which is the main Amhara region who united Ethiopia from Red Sea to Showa. Reading the book makes me think that the author had a good close relationship with then gorilla fighters now the people in power in Ethiopia and its former province Eriteria.
 The worst book on the Horn of Africa I have ever read January 28, 2006
20 out of 24 found this review helpful
Kaplan's book "Balkan Ghosts" was described by slavist H. Cooper (Slavic Review 52, 1993) as "a dreadful mix of unfounded generalizations, misinformation, outdated sources, personal prejudices and bad writing". The same can be applied to "Surrender or starve". Any specialist could point dozens of minor errors in this book, but lack of scholarship is not the worst. Kaplan is exasperatingly tendentious and partial and his extraordinary simplification and misunderstanding of the conflict in the Horn is outrageous. He overemphasizes the ethnic component, sometimes dangerously approaching racism in his contempt for the Amharas (they are all intrinsically bad). To be sure, the Derg (the communist regime) was evil, but linking a particular culture (the Amharas) with a transient political regime that was imposed against the people's will is absolutely wrong. Besides, anyone minimally informed knows how many Amharas suffered by the resettlement policies of the Derg.
Worst of all, Kaplan embraces the politics he presumedly criticizes: "Surrender or starve" is not the slogan of the former Ethiopian communist regime, it is Kaplan's own motto. According to the author, we should have left 10 million Ethiopians starve in 1984-85, so as to foster a local rebellion against communist rule! To put it bluntly, this book is scholarly defective and morally despicable.
Forget Kaplan. If you really want to be informed about the complex reality of Ethiopia and neighboring countries, take a look at any of the books written by historians Bahru Zewde and Harold G. Marcus or by anthropologist Donald Donham. And if you want to be informed and at the same time enjoy a superb literary experience go for Ryszard Kapuscinski's "The Emperor"!
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