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Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed By Jared Diamond ( Penguin (Non-Classics) )
Release Date: 2005-12-27
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List Price: $18.00
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Product Description
In his runaway bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond brilliantly examined the circumstances that allowed Western civilizations to dominate much of the world. Now he probes the other side of the equation: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to fall into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates? Using a vast historical and geographical perspective ranging from Easter Island and the Maya to Viking Greenland and modern Montana, Diamond traces a fundamental pattern of environmental catastrophe—one whose warning signs can be seen in our modern world and that we ignore at our peril. Blending the most recent scientific advances into a narrative that is impossible to put down, Collapse exposes the deepest mysteries of the past even as it offers hope for the future.
“Diamond’s most influential gift may be his ability to write about geopolitical and environmental systems in ways that don’t just educate and provoke, but entertain.” —The Seattle Times
“Extremely persuasive . . . replete with fascinating stories, a treasure trove of historical anecdotes [and] haunting statistics.” —The Boston Globe
“Extraordinary in erudition and originality, compelling in [its] ability to relate the digitized pandemonium of the present to the hushed agrarian sunrises of the far past.” —The New York Times Book Review
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Amazon.com
Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed is the glass-half-empty follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel. While Guns, Germs, and Steel explained the geographic and environmental reasons why some human populations have flourished, Collapse uses the same factors to examine why ancient societies, including the Anasazi of the American Southwest and the Viking colonies of Greenland, as well as modern ones such as Rwanda, have fallen apart. Not every collapse has an environmental origin, but an eco-meltdown is often the main catalyst, he argues, particularly when combined with society's response to (or disregard for) the coming disaster. Still, right from the outset of Collapse, the author makes clear that this is not a mere environmentalist's diatribe. He begins by setting the book's main question in the small communities of present-day Montana as they face a decline in living standards and a depletion of natural resources. Once-vital mines now leak toxins into the soil, while prion diseases infect some deer and elk and older hydroelectric dams have become decrepit. On all these issues, and particularly with the hot-button topic of logging and wildfires, Diamond writes with equanimity. Because he's addressing such significant issues within a vast span of time, Diamond can occasionally speak too briefly and assume too much, and at times his shorthand remarks may cause careful readers to raise an eyebrow. But in general, Diamond provides fine and well-reasoned historical examples, making the case that many times, economic and environmental concerns are one and the same. With Collapse, Diamond hopes to jog our collective memory to keep us from falling for false analogies or forgetting prior experiences, and thereby save us from potential devastations to come. While it might seem a stretch to use medieval Greenland and the Maya to convince a skeptic about the seriousness of global warming, it's exactly this type of cross-referencing that makes Collapse so compelling. --Jennifer Buckendorff
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Another good Diamond take ( msav111 )
Jared Diamond's at it again, providing a comprehensive view of the real root causes and conditions that have brought past civilizations to an end and what we can learn from them today. Though he delves on pre-set circumstances to help determine an outcome of society, he still leaves room for human variables and conscious decisions as we are capable of making. In fact, he not only leaves room for it but insists on its importance when he says from all his background and experience that he is "cautiously optimistic" about mankind's future prospects, depending on how we plan and react to those pre-set circumstances in the future... A decision which we ultimately face and continue to face.
The book can be quite dry at times as it is not a story but an anthropology, yet stick with it as I believe it changed my way of viewing the world and how important our relationship to Earth is.
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 Great book
I read Guns, Germs, and Steel and was so impressed that I bought Collapse. Although it is slightly less engrossing (perhaps because it is about a less uplifting topic), it is still an amazing book.
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 Interesting, but hardly conclusive ( lurch54911 )
Diamond's books are always filled with interesting facts and thought provoking theories about ancient societies. But while I enjoy reading his books, I find his conclusions are often undeveloped.
Although Diamond makes an effort to distance himself from environmental determinism, his writings can often be classified as just that. A typical example can be found in the last chapter, when he notes that the countries with the greatest environmental problems are the same countries with the greatest political problems, concluding that lack of environmental awareness leads to social upheaval. But when evaluating any correlation, the researcher must be aware of directionality (does A cause B or does B cause A?) and a potential third variable (are A and B caused by C?). Only one explanation is considered.
More generally speaking, Diamond seems to pick and choose his examples to fit his theories. I find it very suspicious that in a book that examines the failures of past societies, he neglects to include the ancient Romans!
I'm also annoyed that with such a voluminous collection of statistics, he never uses footnotes. When an author makes the claim that we must solve all of 12 environmental problems within the next 50 years or the world will be doomed to some level of disaster, I want ample citations. I recommend any of Diamond's readers to take a look at Bjorn Lomborg's, "The Skeptical Environmentalist," and see how a researcher should cite his sources. (And, interestingly, how much more optimistic Lomborg is about the state of the world.)
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Not quite up to par... ( jewle33 )
I absolutely loved GGS and highly respect Dr. Diamond as a professor, a writer, and a scientist. However, this book failed to thrill me in the way GGS did. Its wandering, highly anecdotal and verbally confounding chapters left out more detail than they were intended to include and lose the reader in twisted rhetoric and "smart" sounding verbage that really, to the trained scientific eye, is incredibly frustrating and tedious. Dr. Diamond picked some of the most fascinating societies to explore, and gives the reader an intro to each, but I think with some revisions and editing to his journal-like writing style, at least twice as much information could have been included, much in the way GGS was incredible dense, but equally informative. I hate to say it, but I really was at times bored with this book, and wish I hadn't bought it new. GGS remains on my top shelf, where I can access it almost daily, but this one I have a feeling will end up as either kindling or a gift to a less critical friend...
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Collapse of civilizations
I had read Guns, Germs and Steel by the same author previously. This nicely rounds out the other work and I would sincerely recommend that both be read in order to come away with a more comprehensive view of the advances, declines and falls of civilizations and some of the things that are germaine to those processes.
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Addiction
