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Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed | 
| Author: Jared Diamond
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Category: Book
List Price: $18.00
Buy Used: $4.90
You Save: $13.10 (73%)
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Rating:  400 reviews
Sales Rank: 1529
Media: Paperback
Pages: 592
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.5 x 1.2
ISBN: 0143036556
Dewey Decimal Number: 304.28
EAN: 9780143036555
ASIN: 0143036556
Publication Date: December 27, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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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
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 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 catastropheone 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.
Diamonds most influential gift may be his ability to write about geopolitical and environmental systems in ways that dont 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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| Customer Reviews: Read 395 more reviews...
 Great book November 19, 2008
Clean as a Cat (Houston, TX)
I needed this for a class and it came very quick, in great shape, and it's a terrific book for the price.
 Even Diamond Can Write Compost October 22, 2008
Helga Mohammed el-Salami (Beverly Hills, CA)
0 out of 4 found this review helpful
The esteemed Jared Diamond, author of one of the most insightful and profound books of the previous decade: Guns Germs and Steel, tried to break the wave of his success on Collapse, a book about the failure of societies due to a laundry-list of (mostly environmental) issues.
It's too soon to render a verdict on the bearded Professor (unlike Paul Ehrlich and Rachel Carson) since he wisely chose topics which cannot be gauged within a human lifetime but the book itself was a real steaming pile of environmental compost. I can't resist quoting Fred L. Smith Jr. of the Competitive Enterprise Institute: "[a] jumble of jigsaw puzzle pieces laid out on the table - no structure, no serious organization." Indeed, I was so angry after reading this book that I wanted to rip out the 592 pages and use every single one to give the author paper cuts between his toes. Then set him out barefoot on the New Guinea lowlands about which he can't seem to shut the flock up. But this is a book review and I digress because I'm getting all worked up again so I'm going to end this paragraph prema
Good overview of the relationship between the environment & politics September 2, 2008
Knud A. Hermansen
This book makes an good and convincing case for the importance of environmental issues as they affect the well being of all societies developed and developing.
The book is centered around the collapse of past societies, although this is only one of four sections in the book. The first section concerns the environmental problems of Montana to give the reader a personal perspective of societies interaction with its environmental problems. The second section gives the book its title and Diamond goes into the collapse of several historical societies - the Maya, Easter Island, the Greenland Norse, and numerous other societies. One of Diamond's strengths is that he tries to end on a positive note and in the second section he examines historical societies that overcame environmental problems. The third section looks at modern societies facing environmental problems - Hati, Rwanda, Australia and others. Here the author looks at how the same problems that affected past societies are still relevant because they are affecting societies around us today. He also looks to strengthen the connection that he started in the first two sections between environmental problems and political problems. Diamond goes through great lengths to stress that he does not believe that one's fate is solely determined by the environment, but he makes a good case that a society cannot properly combat their political fate without understanding their environmental problems. The forth section is meant to make all of the lessons discussed in the previous chapters relevant to the readers of the book - mainly well-off, first world citizens. He looks at the obstacles to confronting environmental problems and how to best influence companies and societies.
Throughout the book I think Diamond makes a good effort to maintain a balance view and to legitimately understand and address the complaints that many people raise to environmentalist agendas. While I do not consider this to be an overarching book on the world's problems and how to solve them, it would be a good addition to the reading list of anyone who wants to understand the relationship of environmental and political problems and some steps that can be taken to solve them.
Warms up after the first couple chapters August 26, 2008
A. Rehm (Boston)
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
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!
 Obvious pluses and not so obvious minuses August 26, 2008
Persnickety one (Buffalo, NY)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
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. Also, 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 (e.g., didn't Jared Diamond write a Pulitzer Prize winning book called " Guns, GERMS and Steel" that talks about the devastating effects that pestilence had on the indigenous cultures of the New World?) . 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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