Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
- ISBN13: 9780143036555
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Groundbreaking New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
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 fantastic 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 place down, Collapse exposes the deepest mysteries of the past even as it offers hope for the future.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 clarified 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 starts 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 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
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
About This Post
This book is written by a hard core extreme liberal (a real looney). If you bought a Christmas tree, shame on you, because you just killed yourself and all your neighbors with your greedy attempt to delight your children. The author sites mostly ancient civilizations, who were far more dependent on their immediate environment, as an example of how pillaging the environment will lead to collapsed civilizations. What’s more, the author never provides a counterpoint to his extreme tree hugger opinions. This guy is the looniest of them all in the “let’s go back to our cave man days when we didn’t pollute the environment” movement. If there was minus 5 stars, I would give this book a whopping minus 10. If you like extremism at its worst, then this book is a must read.
Rating: 1 / 5
This book was a complete waste of time. I can’t believe anyone would buy this book. Jared just relies on the general 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.
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 other 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 below 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.
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 someone please add an option of zero stars?!?
Rating: 1 / 5
I found 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 other cultures in this case attests to the racism and possibly nefarious intents in writing this book.
Rating: 1 / 5