Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed | Jared Diamond

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed | Jared Diamond | Critical topic, excellent scholarship, yet very accessible

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Collapse: How Soci...

	Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed Jared Diamond Penguin (Non-Classics), 2005 - 592 pages average customer review:based on 398 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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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Warms up after the first couple chapters

Not quite as good as his best-known book, "Guns, Germs and Steel", mostly because the first 50 pages are about Montana. Who cares about Montana? I barely even know where it is. But after that it gets wicked awesome. Unfortunately you can't really skip the Montana parts - too many concepts are introduced that you'll need later - but hey, it's Diamond; you can suck it up for 50 pages. Vikings come later. Vikings!

Critical topic, excellent scholarship, yet very accessible

I have been following the many trends on ecology, politics, and economics for many years. I'll admit I'm a complete pessimist in regards to human nature. Yet Diamond's book gives me a bit of hope that the message of stewardship vs resource consumption may be considered in a systematic way. My hope derives (ironically) from the well-researched conclusion that without a change of course, our planet's ruling class will soon face political/economic unrest resulting from widespread starvation, disease, and death.

Diamond presents overwhelming evidence from the past and current state of affairs to support this idea, without sounding preachy. The bummer is that in the past, rulers insulated themselves from the unrest rather than addressing societal problems, until it was far too late. The dying masses eventually revolted and killed the rulers along with their neighbors. Perhaps through this book (and others like it), those in power today will absorb this lesson and try to avoid the grisly finale.

The scholarship of the book is excellent, as is the writing; later chapters are somewhat more speculative about the eventual impact of humans. Some of the later chapters have a bit of a redundant feel too, as if the author makes his point a few too many times. Yet this is easily the most thoughtful book I've read on a very important topic: what happens when a society becomes it's own worst enemy due to shortsighted policy and a relatively comfortable existence based primarily on depletion of natural resources and ignorance of waste.

I recommend this book more than any other I've read in several years; it is well written, scholarly, and compelling. Enough said. You owe it to yourself to read it, and then pass along the recommendation.

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Obvious pluses and not so obvious minuses

Jared Diamond has a gift for explaining complex phenomena to the average person in a way that is captivating and digestible. In this book, he tackles a topic (the collapse of societies) that is depressing to some and terrifying to others (I suppose it is infuriating to those who just want to be free to build a mine with no environmental protection). He manages to keep the reader's attention for over five hundred pages and leave us with hope for the future -- if we can learn the lessons of the past. He is well read and there is a lot of research behind the book. These are the chief positives. I read the book and was quite taken by it.

The negatives take a bit more time to appreciate. Although Diamond creates a fairly consistent picture that supports his five point framework, it seems that there are other versions of some of the stories (e.g., the fate of the Greenland Norse) that may not fit it so well. Indeed, if you abstract the five point framework you get something like this: there are five factors that lead to societal collapse( self inflicted environmental damage, climate change, the presence of hostile neighbors, the absence of trading partners and finally the efficacy of societies response to the previously mentioned four factors), not all apply in all cases and of course there are other factors (not featured) that sometimes apply. At that point one is tempted to ask, why is five a magic number? I believe the answer is because those are the factors that Diamond wants to talk about -- or because those are the five that the average person wants to hear about. They fit my agenda so I initially accepted them at face value. It was not until I was challenged to think of other factors that lead to societal collapse that the five point framework started to collapse for me. If the five point framework has value, it is as a literary device, not a scientific theory. If taken seriously, it is the kind of framework that finds its way into orthodoxy and creates barriers for further investigation. To me this is a fairly big minus.

Some may say I analyze too much: I should just read and enjoy. But isn't that, after all, the point of scientific inquiry? Isn't that supposed to be the basis for such a book?

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A (mixed) review of the abridged audio book

I am somewhat surprised by the huge success of Diamond's books. They are interesting, yes, and he does address important topics. But he is not a brilliant writer, and his books are overall rather tedious (at least this is what I thought of "The 3rd chimpanzee" and of "Guns Germs and Steel").

I have not read the full book, and I am instead reviewing the abridged audio version read (very well) by Christopher Murney. I found even this shorter version rather dull. List after list of dates, names, plants, crops and animals. Prof Diamond certainly documents well the few "case studies" he presents, but he also has too much love for numbered lists ("this is due to five factors", "there are three reasons for this" etc etc) and his prose is fairly boring.

The book is interesting when it describes how socio-economic and environmental factors, as well as happenstance, determined the collapse or the failure of past societies. However, the main environmentalist message is hardly new, and the conclusions are shockingly superficial and badly justified for a book whose faults include (in other parts of the book) the supply of too much details. As others have also pointed out, the use of correlations to argue the existence of causation is a surprising let-down in the final chapters.

I particularly liked the argument that more environmental-friendly policies could be obtained if more information were provided to the consumer, and I agree with the argument that it is the consumer who should pay for the cost of the environmental damage produced. In this way, higher prices will lead to lower demand, and we will stop free-riding and bequeathing the environmental costs to our descendants. However, once again, this is hardly a particularly deep point, and it's something that one can easily understand by him/herself. Rather harder, maybe, would be to find ways to counter the efforts of powerful lobbies that want to avoid regulations which would provide the consumer with better information.

Anyway, despite all the above shortcoming, this is an interesting book, and even if I don't feel like recommending it highly, I still think you won't waste time by reading it. I am, however, happy that I decided to buy the abridged version!

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