Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive
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In Collapse, Jared Diamond investigates the fate of past human societies, and the lessons for our own future. What happened to the people who built the ruined temples of Angkor Wat, the long-abandonded statues of Easter Island, the crumbling Maya pyramids of the Yucatan? All saw their cultures collapse because of environmental crises. And it looks as if persons crises were self-induced. As in his celebrated global best-seller Guns, Germs and Steel, Diamond brings together new evidence from a startling range of sources to tell a tale with epic scope. And he lends it urgency for the modern world by probing the roots of decisions which allowed some societies to avoid ecological catastrophe, while others succumbed. How, he questions, can we learn to be survivors?Amazon.com Review
Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Make it is the glass-half-empty follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel. While Guns, Germs, and Steel clarified the geographic and environmental reasons why some human populations have flourished, Collapse uses the same factors to examine why very 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 regularly 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 leader makes clear that this is not a mere environmentalist’s diatribe. He starts by setting the book’s main question in the tiny communities of present-day Montana as they face a decline in living standards and a reduction 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 all-purpose, Diamond provides fine and well-reasoned past examples, building 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 fake 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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This book was a perfect waste of time. I can’t judge anyone would buy this book. Jared just relies on the all-purpose idiots ignorance to pull his own personal agenda throughout the entire book. There are so many fake claims. This book is full of fluff.
There is a reason it is now 40% off.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Do not buy this book! To examine only a part of this book, his picture of Greenland Society is completely at odds with the known history of the Norse Society that florished there for over 500 years. Among additional claims Diamond makes is that the Greenlanders had a taboo against fishing! Nonsence, they came from Iceland and Norway, where fishing has been part of the culture since before pre-history.
Diamond also claims that the Greelanders could not smelt iron because they cut down their forests! The only forests on Greenland were birch thickets and there is no source of iron ore to smelt. The small iron they had had to be imported from Iceland or from Vinland.
Another of his abserd claims is that the Greenlanders starved. For 500 years? They didn’t starve, the population fell not more than a level where it could ststain itself and the Greenlanders just slowly died out.
Basically Diamond is a doomsaying tree hugger who is relying on the ignorance of the average person to push his political adgenda. The best place for this and all of Diamond’s books is in the compost heap.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Books Premise: Stop doing anything productive or fun otherwise you will have nothing less that the blood of Western Civilization on your hands. And for proof one need look no further than that all vital region–the hey fields of Montana. Can a name please add an option of zero stars?!?
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I establish the refrence (page 371) to Chinese people alongside beetles, diseases, and some virulent and adaptive carp to be extremely racist and fundamentally unacceptable. People should not be named alongside diseases and animals, especially in such an insulting manner. Diamond’s blatant disrespect for additional cultures in this case attests to the racism and possibly disreputable intents in writing this book.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
We’ve all heard of Euro-trash – I’d like to coin a new axiom: Academia-trash – for the sole purpose of describing works like this.
Sure, everyone who is anyone raves about this book and others like it. Most are fellow literary travelers on the road to mediocrity – leading the ill-informed public by the nose to their profound view of “how and why all things take place”.
To me this is mere drivel – simplistic pop culture-like scribbling. Pseudo-science wrapped in the guise of profundity. A waste of time for any right thinking, concerned individual.
I grow so weary of this new wave of trendy, pop culture, pseudo-science books that is covering the landscape today. It’s indeed a bring shame on that so many of these books are the product of ill-informed university professors. It’s a sad commentary on the level of right education in academia today.
The only “dynamic” I see here is the dynamic of the uneducated flocking to a new pop-hit book that they “must have”. Notice I said “must have” and not the more commonly used “must read” – for don’t kid yourself authors: many who buy these works never really work their way through them…
This new wave of academia is so enthralled with its discipline-point jargon and “in” cliques of self perceived enlightenment, that I marvel if they still remember how to spell “gobbley-gook”…
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5