Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
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Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed description
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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Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥ |
Good book, but needs a whole lot of editing
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If Jared Diamond considers running for the U.S. presidency, I may support him. This amazing polymath is incredibly well-informed, resourceful, and will lend an ear to various opinions on different issues without compromising his convictions based on his experience and research. Most people have read his "Guns, Germs, and Steel", but fewer people I know have read "Collapse" or "The Third Chimpanzee", both of which are highly informative for knowledge-thirsty readers like myself. All of his books display an amazing breadth of knowledge and interest that it is hard to imagine that this guy used to be a physiologist. Now he seems to have found his permanent niche in geography.
Jared's resourcefulness and absorption for the subject of why past societies collapsed and his case against "environmental determinism" are laudable. Many parts of the book read like they were written late at night, when the author is deep in analytical thoughts. Some parts were extremely fluent and readable, for example, the chapter on Montana and the chapters on Hispaniola, New Guinea, Rwanda, and Japan. You could curl up with these chapters, enjoying every paragraph.
Other parts, however, read like a dry textbook, or seemed like inscribed from a lecture in his UCLA classroom. The degree to which he enumerates reasons or factors (again and again) for societal collapses can be tiresome. Or, in confronting our current environmental problems, he yet again reminds us of what transpired on Easter Island, Pitcairn Islands, Mayan and Anasazi societies, New Guinea, Greenland, Australia, etc. You get the feeling that he is injecting his points right into your head. Sometimes he tries to add a funny, if not geeky, remark that is unworthy of what should be a serious book in geography and history. Chapters on Norse settlements in Greenland and the white settlement of Australia were written at great lengths that could use some editing.
Jared is a decent, but not an elegant, writer. If I was going to read another comprehensive treatment of a similar subject, I would be more excited if it was written more succintly--and much more elegantly. Perhaps he could take up the writing styles of Richard Dawkins, Thomas Friedman, Stanley Karnow, Stephen Ambrose, Pater Hopkirk, and Oliver Sacks, to name a few. I give him credit nonetheless for writing about an important subject that is relevant for modern-day societies. With improved technology, globalization, and the availability of knowledge and understanding of which societies collapsed, including how and why, we have the choice not to repeat the hard lessons of history. |
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