Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed | Jared Diamond

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed | Jared Diamond | Another good Diamond take

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Collapse: How Soci...

	Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed Jared Diamond, 2005 - 592 pages average customer review:based on 402 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Great book

I read Guns, Germs, and Steel and was so impressed that I bought Collapse. Although it is slightly less engrossing (perhaps because it is about a less uplifting topic), it is still an amazing book.

Another good Diamond take

Jared Diamond's at it again, providing a comprehensive view of the real root causes and conditions that have brought past civilizations to an end and what we can learn from them today. Though he delves on pre-set circumstances to help determine an outcome of society, he still leaves room for human variables and conscious decisions as we are capable of making. In fact, he not only leaves room for it but insists on its importance when he says from all his background and experience that he is "cautiously optimistic" about mankind's future prospects, depending on how we plan and react to those pre-set circumstances in the future... A decision which we ultimately face and continue to face.

The book can be quite dry at times as it is not a story but an anthropology, yet stick with it as I believe it changed my way of viewing the world and how important our relationship to Earth is.

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Interesting, but hardly conclusive

Diamond's books are always filled with interesting facts and thought provoking theories about ancient societies. But while I enjoy reading his books, I find his conclusions are often undeveloped.

Although Diamond makes an effort to distance himself from environmental determinism, his writings can often be classified as just that. A typical example can be found in the last chapter, when he notes that the countries with the greatest environmental problems are the same countries with the greatest political problems, concluding that lack of environmental awareness leads to social upheaval. But when evaluating any correlation, the researcher must be aware of directionality (does A cause B or does B cause A?) and a potential third variable (are A and B caused by C?). Only one explanation is considered.

More generally speaking, Diamond seems to pick and choose his examples to fit his theories. I find it very suspicious that in a book that examines the failures of past societies, he neglects to include the ancient Romans!

I'm also annoyed that with such a voluminous collection of statistics, he never uses footnotes. When an author makes the claim that we must solve all of 12 environmental problems within the next 50 years or the world will be doomed to some level of disaster, I want ample citations. I recommend any of Diamond's readers to take a look at Bjorn Lomborg's, "The Skeptical Environmentalist," and see how a researcher should cite his sources. (And, interestingly, how much more optimistic Lomborg is about the state of the world.)

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Not quite up to par...

I absolutely loved GGS and highly respect Dr. Diamond as a professor, a writer, and a scientist. However, this book failed to thrill me in the way GGS did. Its wandering, highly anecdotal and verbally confounding chapters left out more detail than they were intended to include and lose the reader in twisted rhetoric and "smart" sounding verbage that really, to the trained scientific eye, is incredibly frustrating and tedious. Dr. Diamond picked some of the most fascinating societies to explore, and gives the reader an intro to each, but I think with some revisions and editing to his journal-like writing style, at least twice as much information could have been included, much in the way GGS was incredible dense, but equally informative. I hate to say it, but I really was at times bored with this book, and wish I hadn't bought it new. GGS remains on my top shelf, where I can access it almost daily, but this one I have a feeling will end up as either kindling or a gift to a less critical friend...

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