Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: Revised EditionIn Jared Diamond’s follow-up to the Pulitzer-Prize winning Guns, Germs and Steel, the author explores how climate change, the population explosion and political discord create the conditions for the collapse of civilization. Diamond is also the author of Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis
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How can such bad news be so entertaining
User Review - marsattacks28 - Overstock.comThe choices we have made as a people have led man down a precarious path now more than ever. Dwindling resources overcrowded cities and a shortview perspective have put man on the precipice of fate. A must read. Read full review
Growing up in America at the end of the Cold War, I should be forgiven for getting the impression that only an act of nuclear-powered global self-immolation stood between us and a glorious future of eternal progress, that only two possibilities existed: a future technological paradise and a blighted Mad Max wasteland. "Collapse" by Jared Diamond serves as antidote. Its litany of collapsed civilizations proves that only hubris allows us to imagine that our own civilization will go on forever or that it takes something as dramatic as nuclear war to bring it to an end. Diamond tries to shed light on how it will happen to us by examining the history of collapsed civilizations such as the Mayans, the Anasazi, the Greenland Norse, and the Easter Islanders. We may be done in by something as banal as soil erosion or over-dependence on imported resources. He manages to be surprisingly even-handed when he handles topics like climate change that have become fodder for American politics.
Contents
27 | |
Twilight at Easter | 79 |
The Last People Alive Pitcairn and Henderson Islands | 120 |
The Ancient Ones The Anasazi and Their Neighbors | 136 |
The Maya Collapses | 157 |
The Viking Prelude and Fugues | 178 |
Norse Greenlands Flowering | 211 |
Norse Greenlands End | 248 |
China Lurching Giant | 358 |
Mining Australia | 378 |
Why Do Some Societies Make Disastrous | 419 |
Big Businesses and the Environment | 441 |
The World as a Polder What Does It All Mean | 486 |
Angkors Rise and Fall | 526 |
Acknowledgments | 540 |
575 | |
Opposite Paths to Success | 277 |
Malthus in Africa Rwandas Genocide | 311 |
One Island Two Peoples Two Histories | 329 |
Illustration Credits | 590 |
Other editions - View all
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: Revised Edition Jared Diamond Limited preview - 2011 |