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

A book for our times

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

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.

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.

I liked his interviews and presentations better

I love his interviews, and presentations, but he comes across more accessible in those formats.
This was densely packed, but I am not well versed enough in the Greek writers to connect.
It came across like a senior seminar for me, intense, dry, concentrated.
I just may need the same stories more diluted.
I like the topic, and will look into his other stuff.

Needed an editor

The book itself is mostly a journalistic apology for prior dalliances in the making of foreign policy and regret about how things turned out. I don't find the framework of tragedy as being particularly useful whether one is trying to diagnose situations or formulate policy, but I suppose what most stuck out for me was how poorly edited this book was. On multiple occasions there were sentences and whole paragraphs that one had heard before that popped up again in a different chapter verbatim. as I listen to this book in audiobook form, that was rather disconcerting as you had to keep wondering whether something was wrong with the recording.

Major Errors with Audiobook

I love Kaplan and this book is great.

But like others have noted the releases copy has major problems like multiple repeated chapters.

And you can see these have been called out for over a month and still aren’t fixed. So something needs to be done here still.

What is this book about??

A mindless rambling to no end. Utter waste of your time.
From revenge of geography to this!!

Audible, please fix this audiobook

Author seems to have an interesting message to the world but audio is littered with redundant passages. Have other passages been omitted as well? Don't buy this book before Audible has made the necessary technical interventions for a non-frustrating listening experience.

Flawed annoying audio quality control

Chapters repeat multiple times. Like Groundhog Day. Please save future readers from frustration by fixing problems