Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail Or Succeed

Jared Diamond--a modern-day Gibbon with a scientific perspective--has created a study of the decline and fall of civilizations and societies that holds many lessons. In GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL, Diamond offered new and insightful reasons for the rise of civilizations; here he studies their fall, or collapse. His case studies include, among others, the once technologically-advanced Mayans, the Anasazi in North America, the Easter Island inhabitants, and the Vikings, showing how environment and bad decisions were often factors in their collapse. Diamond believes that the actions of humans can halt or prevent decline, as he shows in the case of modern-day Japan, which has embarked on ambitious reforesting--and, importantly, Jared says the signs are there long before the collapse. A New York Times Notable Book of the Year for 2005.

"[A] manifestly important work." - Socorro Guadalupe Herrera (Times Literary Supplement, 5/13/05)

"[D]ogged, fact-thick empiricism....[A] natural history of societal failure...." - Valerie Thompson (New York Review of Books, 3/24/05)

"[M]agnificent...extraordinary in erudition and originality, compelling in [its] ability to relate the digitalized pandemonium of the present to the hushed agragrian sunrises of the far past...." - George Carey (New York Times Book Review, 1/30/05)

"Diamond's case studies have a thoroughness appropriate to the moral seriousness of his inquiry." - Charles ALfred Fisher (London Review of Books, 5/19/05)

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