Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
by Jared Diamond
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jared DiamondEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2005-12-27
ISBN: 0143036556
Number of pages: 575
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780143036555
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
- Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices
Book Reviews of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Book Review: Plates missing from the Kindle edition
Summary: 2 Stars
This (excellent) book comes with two sets of images: 1) maps of the places where the different societies mentioned lived (Easter Island, Australia, Greenland, China, etc.) and 2) Sets of plates with 40 or so additional photos. The maps are included in the Kindle edition, although they don't look too god. The screen resolution is too small, so they look very, very blurry and the text in the maps is utterly unreadable. I uploaded a couple of screen grabs so you can judge for yourselves. Can anyone read the names of those tiny little islands? Thank God we have Google Earth. As for the plates mentioned in the text, well, they ain't there at all. That's a sloppy digitalizing job, Penguin.
Summary of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
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 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 put down, Collapse exposes the deepest mysteries of the past even as it offers hope for the future.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
Early Civilization Books
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