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Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed | 
 enlarge | Author: Jared Diamond
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Category: Book
List Price: $18.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  396 reviews
Sales Rank: 901
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 592
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
Condition: Standard shipping arrives within 6-8 business days. This is the textbook only unless otherwise noted. Cover Wear
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com
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 391 more reviews...
 Critical topic, excellent scholarship, yet very accessible August 17, 2008
I have been following the many trends on ecology, politics, and economics for many years. I'll admit I'm a complete pessimist in regards to human nature. Yet Diamond's book gives me a bit of hope that the message of stewardship vs resource consumption may be considered in a systematic way. My hope derives (ironically) from the well-researched conclusion that without a change of course, our planet's ruling class will soon face political/economic unrest resulting from widespread starvation, disease, and death.
Diamond presents overwhelming evidence from the past and current state of affairs to support this idea, without sounding preachy. The bummer is that in the past, rulers insulated themselves from the unrest rather than addressing societal problems, until it was far too late. The dying masses eventually revolted and killed the rulers along with their neighbors. Perhaps through this book (and others like it), those in power today will absorb this lesson and try to avoid the grisly finale.
The scholarship of the book is excellent, as is the writing; later chapters are somewhat more speculative about the eventual impact of humans. Some of the later chapters have a bit of a redundant feel too, as if the author makes his point a few too many times. Yet this is easily the most thoughtful book I've read on a very important topic: what happens when a society becomes it's own worst enemy due to shortsighted policy and a relatively comfortable existence based primarily on depletion of natural resources and ignorance of waste.
I recommend this book more than any other I've read in several years; it is well written, scholarly, and compelling. Enough said. You owe it to yourself to read it, and then pass along the recommendation.
 condition not revealed August 14, 2008
I was sorry to find underlining in the book. Underlining should be revealed as part of the condition of the book,
 A (mixed) review of the abridged audio book July 29, 2008
I am somewhat surprised by the huge success of Diamond's books. They are interesting, yes, and he does address important topics. But he is not a brilliant writer, and his books are overall rather tedious (at least this is what I thought of "The 3rd chimpanzee" and of "Guns Germs and Steel").
I have not read the full book, and I am instead reviewing the abridged audio version read (very well) by Christopher Murney. I found even this shorter version rather dull. List after list of dates, names, plants, crops and animals. Prof Diamond certainly documents well the few "case studies" he presents, but he also has too much love for numbered lists ("this is due to five factors", "there are three reasons for this" etc etc) and his prose is fairly boring.
The book is interesting when it describes how socio-economic and environmental factors, as well as happenstance, determined the collapse or the failure of past societies. However, the main environmentalist message is hardly new, and the conclusions are shockingly superficial and badly justified for a book whose faults include (in other parts of the book) the supply of too much details. As others have also pointed out, the use of correlations to argue the existence of causation is a surprising let-down in the final chapters.
I particularly liked the argument that more environmental-friendly policies could be obtained if more information were provided to the consumer, and I agree with the argument that it is the consumer who should pay for the cost of the environmental damage produced. In this way, higher prices will lead to lower demand, and we will stop free-riding and bequeathing the environmental costs to our descendants. However, once again, this is hardly a particularly deep point, and it's something that one can easily understand by him/herself. Rather harder, maybe, would be to find ways to counter the efforts of powerful lobbies that want to avoid regulations which would provide the consumer with better information.
Anyway, despite all the above shortcoming, this is an interesting book, and even if I don't feel like recommending it highly, I still think you won't waste time by reading it. I am, however, happy that I decided to buy the abridged version!
Not starling but fair July 15, 2008
In Collapse, Jared Diamond utilizes what is on the surface a sound scientific approach to the problems of societies and their eventual collapse. Unfortunately, the focus of this topic is visibly narrow. For his "prehistoric" examples he used 1,000 year old societies, in addition to more recent ones, and found what he believed to be that all societies were basically inharmonious realities forever striving to coexist with the natural world. Fair enough, but this goes somewhat against common sense. There are certainly examples of simple cultures living relatively harmoniously with nature, even today in South America, despite modern encroachment. Unfortunately, Diamond uses the lens of western civilization to examine the failure of civilization and in the end that is the book's overall failure. Truth be told, the greatest underlying cause of collapse is civilization itself - the blood thirsty, energy hungry entity that continually seeks more until it is finally done. The fact is it is apparent that the agricultural revolution changed the landscape of the world deeply. While there are differing reasons for social collapses, both macro and micro, it is only those where great accumulation is characteristic that these societies were able to severely alter their own habitats to the point where things like sudden die-off or collapse occurred with predictable frequency. In examining human cultures, we must look closely to all parts of human history and not merely that which dates to the written tablet or page. Even before this point we see a rich landscape of human activity whose economies and lifestyles are all too commonly misunderstood or left out. Where this book excels is at explaining the technical process of societies failing and lacks in finding answers, while a more expansive critique is left wanting. As writers and anthropologists we should not leave important parts of human history simply out of focus, yet this is one of the major sins of the western world.
Another good Diamond take July 3, 2008
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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