Do societies choose to fail or suceed? Yes!

Jared Diamond does a decent job of using anthropology to talk about history. Well there are flaws in his theory on the history of some of these peoples the idea is one that bears some thinking. The idea that societies overpopulation can cause them to fail is an idea that has merit today. Diamond goes all the way up through China and India to talk about their overpopulation and resource issues. In a Malthusian way he analyzes food and climate concerns related to the Mayan civilizations which are where his book gets the weakest. The Mayan collapsed due to other factors than what he gives credit for (See Conquest, Borken Spears, ect). This book still bears consideration though and is interesting to read about.

Thought-Provoking -- Action-Goading?

After Diamond won his MacArthur (the "genius grant") - a tribute to his Pulitzer-Prize-winning book, "Guns, Germs & Steel" - he embarked on a new project, and one that is just as ambitious: why societies fail. Taking advantage of his wide experience and far-flung travel, he has marshaled together case studies of many different peoples, in many different places: Viking settlements in North America and Greenland, the Mayan civilization in South America, and various islands, such as Easter Island, in the South Pacific. He also compares them in a coherent manner to societies which managed to back away from the brink, such as Tikopia and Iceland.

A Timely Masterpiece

Jared Diamond has done it again. In each new book he writes, Professor Diamond achieves a greater depth of insight and spread of scope. The author has built on a theme that began with "The Third Chimpanzee," an excellent account of the evolutionary history of humanity. His next major work, "Guns, Germs, and Steel," won the Pulitzer, and is a larger look at the socio-historical forces that have shaped the contemporary globe, namely the dominance of Western culture due to a mastery of firearms, domestic animals and their diseases, and iron. "Collapse" will probably garner Professor Diamond another Pulitzer, as the scope of the work is immensely scholarly, and the book was not assembled from an armchair, but from actual experience in the field. The author has visited two of the locales in his book over the span of several decades, and he writes with authority about both Montana and New Guinea. Beginning in Montana, Mr. Diamond applies his five-point framework to a modern U.S. state, detailing the startling ecological damage in what he reveals is one of the least-damaged states. He then studies the more well-known Easter Island collapse, and throws in a chapter on the far lesser known aboriginal inhabitants of Pitcairn and Henderson Islands.