Collapse

By: Jared Diamond

Narrated by: Christopher Murney

In 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.

Environmental damage, climate change, globalization, rapid population growth, and unwise political choices were all factors in the demise of societies around the world, but some found solutions and persisted. As in Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond traces the fundamental pattern of catastrophe, and weaves an all-encompassing global thesis through a series of fascinating historical-cultural narratives. Collapse moves from the Polynesian cultures on Easter Island to the flourishing American civilizations of the Anasazi and the Maya and finally to the doomed Viking colony on Greenland. Similar problems face us today and have already brought disaster to Rwanda and Haiti, even as China and Australia are trying to cope in innovative ways. Despite our own society’s apparently inexhaustible wealth and unrivaled political power, ominous warning signs have begun to emerge even in ecologically robust areas like Montana.

Brilliant, illuminating, and immensely absorbing, Collapse is destined to take its place as one of the essential books of our time, raising the urgent question: How can our world best avoid committing ecological suicide?©2004 Jared Diamond; (P)2004 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"Mr. Diamond...is a lucid writer with an ability to make arcane scientific concepts readiily accesible to the lay reader, and his case studies of failed cultures are never less than compelling." The New York Times

"...Collapse is a magisterial effort packed with insight and written with clarity and enthusiasm." Businessweek

"Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse represent one of the most significant projects embarked upon by any intellectual of our generation. They are magnificent books: extraordinary in erudition and originality, compelling in their ability to relate the digitized pandemonium of the present to the hushed agrarian sunrises of the far past. I read both thinking what literature might be like if every author knew so much, wrote so clearly and formed arguments with such care." Gregg Easterbrook, The New York Times Book Review

He does it again!!!

Every American should read this book. I think it could spark great debate, no matter which side of the issue you are on. That is what this country needs, good old fashioned debate on what we want our country to stand for, where we should head and how to get there. This is not a political book but a survival guide for future minded civilizations and societies.

If you want to pick up or listen to a book that says everything is rosy, fiction, then this might not be your book. If you want a great research book on why societies have not lasted and what might be some of the lessons, this is definitely your book. "Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it", this at a time when the schools are getting rid of history classes to make the grade in other subjects.

Guns, Germs and Steel is his previous book and is an awesome read also.

fascinating but oh so depressing

The first half to 2/3's of the book is great and interesting, but the last is depressing because the alternatives are so bleak, and well, how many ways can you say that over and over and over.

A Careful Treatment of a Complex Issue

Any additional comments?

In _Collapse_, Jared Diamond thoughtfully and respectfully examines the complex interplay of factors that lead to a society's success or failure. Although it reads like a college textbook at times, and some of the material could have been edited out with no loss of clarity, it certainly is a fascinating survey of various cultures and an illuminating guide to a complex set of issues facing all of humanity.

Excellent

Brings very interesting ideas to how the world has been shaped. He cleary explains how the experiences and problems of past socities are directly related to today.

For us all

Riveting, scary, hopeful worldview. Insightful investigations into histories/mysteries of Easter Island, Greenland?ground up and top down perspectives.