The follow up to his previous work, Guns, Germs & Steel, Diamond focuses in COLLAPSE not on how and why societies develop, but how they fall apart. His thesis being that environmental change is primary cause of societal collapse, and often times those changes are caused by the society itself.
As with Guns, Germs & Steel, COLLAPSE is an explanation of a thesis along with numerous examples from human history. In his prior work his meticulous style occasionally bordered on the pedantic, in this book it becomes downright horrific. The book reduces to a series of disaster stories, describing and analyzing how entire civilizations fall apart. The stories are compelling, in the same way that train wrecks are. By the time you get to his discussion of modern civilization you are almost scared to see what he has to say.
COLLAPSE is as good a read, if not better than, Guns, Germs & Steel. It is not a happy book however. Some history books are great for curling up in a chair with a glass of scotch - by the end of COLLAPSE, you will be sucking gin straight from the bottle. It's fascinating, compelling, depressing and enlightening, all at the same time.
In his million-copy bestseller
Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond examined how and why Western civilizations developed the technologies and immunities that allowed them to dominate much of the world. Now in this brilliant companion volume, Diamond probes the other side of the equation: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates?
As in Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond weaves an all-encompassing global thesis through a series of fascinating historical-cultural narratives. Moving from the Polynesian cultures on Easter Island to the flourishing American civilizations of the Anasazi and the Maya and finally to the doomed Viking colony on Greenland, Diamond traces the fundamental pattern of catastrophe. Environmental damage, climate change, rapid population growth, and unwise political choices were all factors in the demise of these societies, but other societies found solutions and persisted. Similar problems face us today and have already brought disaster to Rwanda and Haiti, even as China and Australia are trying to cope in innovative ways. Despite our own societyβs apparently inexhaustible wealth and unrivaled political power, ominous warning signs have begun to emerge even in ecologically robust areas like Montana.
Brilliant, illuminating, and immensely absorbing, Collapse is destined to take its place as one of the essential books of our time, raising the urgent question: How can our world best avoid committing ecological suicide?
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