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Interviews
S.J. Parris
S.J. Parris writes about her inspiration for Heresy, which masterfully blends true events with fiction into a page-turning murder mystery set on the sixteenth-century Oxford University campus.
John Hart
In a letter to his readers, John Hart talks about becoming a writer and the challenges he faced in writing The Last Child.
Adam Haslett
A conversation with Adam Haslett, author of Union Atlantic, a deeply affecting portrait of the modern gilded age, the first decade of the twenty-first century.
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   Summary and Book Reviews

Collapse: Summary and book reviews of Collapse by Jared Diamond, plus links to an excerpt from Collapse and a biography of Jared Diamond.

Collapse Collapse
How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
by Jared Diamond
Hardcover: Dec 2004,
575 pages.
Paperback: Jan 2006,
592 pages.

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Critics' Opinion:   good
Readers' Rating:  Five Stars
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In his million-copy bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond examined how andwhy Western civilizations developed the technologies and immunities that allowed them to dominate much of the world. Now in this brilliant companion volume, Diamond probes the other side of the equation: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates?

As in Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond weaves an all-encompassing global thesis through a series of fascinating historical-cultural narratives. Moving 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, Diamond traces the fundamental pattern of catastrophe. Environmental damage, climate change, rapid population growth, and unwise political choices were all factors in the demise of these societies, but other societies found solutions and persisted. 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?

Book Reviews

Good BookBrowse
Diamond's bottom line is clear - for all our technology and electronic widgets, we are still bound to nature and reliant on it. As always, you can judge this book for yourself by reading a substantial excerpt at BookBrowse, which will give you an understanding of the book's overall premise sufficient to hold your own in conversation on the subject with most people!
Full Review Members Only (members only, 462 words).


Good  Publishers Weekly
Diamond is a brilliant expositor of everything from anthropology to zoology, providing a lucid background of scientific lore to support a stimulating, incisive historical account of these many declines and falls. Readers will find his book an enthralling, and disturbing, reminder of the indissoluble links that bind humans to nature.

Good  Booklist - Brad Hooper
Drawing examples from ... Polynesian culture on Easter Island to the Viking outposts in Greenland to the Mayan civilization in Central America, the author finds the fundamental pattern of catastrophe that is apparent in these populations that once flourished and then collapsed. The template he holds up is a construct based on five factors, including environmental damage, climate change, and hostile neighbors. In addition, Diamond casts his critical but acute and inclusive gaze on the issue of why civilizations fail to see collapse coming. A thought-provoking book containing not a single page of dense prose.

Good  Scientific American - Robert S Desowitz, emeritus professor of tropical
Collapse is a big book, 500-plus pages. It may well become a seminal work, although its plea for societal survival through ecological conservation is rather like preaching to the choir. It is not a page-turner, especially for slow readers of short attention span (like this reviewer). Some of Diamond's case studies may be overkilled by overdetail. The last section, on practical lessons, seems disconnected from the central Collapse story and almost constitutes a separate book. But, having discharged the reviewer's obligation to be critical, my recommendation would definitely be to read the book. It will challenge and make you think—long after you have turned that last 500th-plus page.

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