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Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
by Jared Diamond
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Viking Adult (2004-12-29)
ISBN: 0670033375
EAN: 9780670033379
Dewey Decimal #: 304.28
Binding/Media: Hardcover - 592 pages
Edition: 1
SKU: 7026-Collapse-R
Condition: Collectible: Like New
Comments: Viking Penguin. 2005, later printing. 575 pp, small 4to. Pages 493-504 bumped at top edges, but caused no tears.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
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 society’s 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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Amazon.com Review
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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Customer Reviews
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Baldy Written
Rating  (3)
Date: 2010-08-20
0 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
In order to survive and to thrive, communities must balance openness with closeness; openness is a willingness to face the challenges of the outside world (rival nations, the environment, etc.) and the conflicts within, and closeness is a stubborn blind faith in tradition, custom, and direction that ties the community together. Too much openness, and the community will end up like Canada -- but too much closeness, and the community will also fail.
This is the main thesis of Jared Diamond's "Collapse," although he doesn't frame it this way. According to Professor Diamond, societies fail or succeed because of five factors: environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, friendly trade partners, and society's responses to environmental problems. While all five may be relevant I don't think they are all equally weighed. The author believes the environment to be the deciding factor, but I disagree. Every society faces crises, and ultimately it's a society's response (whether it is willing to confront the challenge, and whether it is an open and dynamic enough of society to formulate an effective, united response) that's the deciding factor.
Professor Diamond's book is lush with concrete examples, and it is an informative guide to world cultures. But it's also badly organized and badly written, and I found it extremely difficult to traverse through the lush terrain, which was so overloaded I found it much of a swamp than a meadow.
Consider this: if Professor Diamond had his way he would have called his book "Societal collapses involving an environmental component, and in some cases also contributions of climate change, hostile neighbors, and trade partners, plus questions of societal responses." Enough said.
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Such an insightful author.
Rating  (5)
Date: 2010-08-17
Jared is truly talented at taking complex, multi-factorial issues and making them understandable in a simple form. A great read, and under $13. Highly recommended.
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Lessons for Us
Rating  (4)
Date: 2010-08-14
This book came in perfect shape! It is full of important and interesting facts about some of the most fascinating cultures of the past and present, like Easter Island, the Norse Vikings, the Mayan civilization, and more. The author shows us what makes societies succeed or fail and is full of lessons for our time too.
There are warnings and hope in this book. It's a bit difficult because it's so full of information. I would recommend it!!
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Dense but Worthwhile
Rating (4)
Date: 2010-08-13
I really enjoyed this book. It's my second Jared Diamond book (after Guns, Germs, and Steel) so I knew
that the book would be dense and slow-reading. However, like the previous book, I found the vast amount
of information fascinating and the "moral" of the different tales that he tells to be one well worth
paying attention to today. Diamond is not a great writer but a great synthesizer of information.
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Mindless Drivel
Rating  (1)
Date: 2010-07-26
1 out of 11 customers found this reveiw helpful
As usual, Jared has produced a work of almost unimaginable drivel.
On page 285 he describes New Guineans as "more curious and experimental than any other people." As proof, he offers a story of how they did not know the use of pencils and instead had used them as "a plug through the pierced nasal septum." In other words, as a bone through their noses!
These stone aged people, who have no written language and wear no clothes, are only described as being "primitive" with quotation marks, and only as seeming so to Europeans. Since their civilization did not collapse, they are seemingly only included in the tale to demonstrate that Europeans are "horrified" (page 281), "don't understand" (page 280), "innovations failed" (page 281) and "come to appreciate" (page 282).
In short, New Guineans are the golden example that Europeans fail to meet.
He then claims that terrain ruggedness had confined European explorers to the coast for 400 years, when a far more likely explanation is that the people of New Guinea are well known to be the world's most notorious cannibals!
When discussing the marvelous examples that they set, Jared makes no mention of how they bless their new homes with blood by decapitating a victim and dragging the headless body around the perimeter, or how they cover the skulls of those they have eaten with black bee's wax and cowry shells.
Although I am sure that the Ivy League loony liberal bigots for whom these works are written have taken it all as gospel.
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