Book report: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond
Book report: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond
Having read Diamond’s phenomenal “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” I was looking forward to reading “Collapse.” GG&S was a brilliant analysis of why European and Asian societies came to dominate the rest of the world. This success was ultimately deduced from the effects of geography, with all of the logic and inevitability of the proof of a theorem in geometry.
I expected the same kind of sharp analysis in Collapse, but I was very disappointed. This book is a rambling, anecdote-laden presentation of certain cherry-picked historical societies like Norse Greenland, Easter Island, the Mayans, the Anasazi, and modern Montana, where Diamond regularly vacations. His main point seems to be that societies that don’t take care of their natural resources – especially their trees – collapse, sometimes very suddenly.
Okay, certainly a good point, but one that could have been presented far more succinctly than this 608-page paperback. This book cries out for a good editing. Do we really need to know about Diamond’s sons’ fishing guides in Montana? Is it necessary to hear about his bird-watching trips to New Guinea? I skipped large sections of narration and still felt like I had wasted a LOT of time.
My suggestion, if you’re curious about what he has to say, is to skip to the summary chapter at the end, unless you have some particular interest in one of the societies he highlights.
It seems extremely ironic that, given his theme, he didn’t try to save a few trees.
Recommendation: skip to the end.
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