5-star topic.
Minus 1 for tragic presentation of materialism in the first half.
Minus 2 for farcical political economy in the second half.

The Tragic:
--The first half surveys a handful of historical collapses and a few survivals; frankly, I do not think there is need to give too much credit for a good choice of topic and some quantitative "fact"-gathering. This topic deserves much higher expectations.
--For direct critiques of Diamond from anthropologists, see: Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire. Diamond falls under “environmental/geographical/ecological determinism”; this must be critiqued carefully:
i) On the surface, we may be tempted to swing the other way and focus on ideas driving social change (i.e. idealism), ex. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, which critiques “ecological determinism” in Ch.5.
ii) However, this would create a false binary. The real tragedy of Diamond is presenting a diluted historical materialism, which is actually a foundational lens for analyzing history.
...Indeed, this lens starts with the material conditions which humans reproduce themselves (production/distribution/surplus/reproduction), but this must be carefully synthesized with other side of the coin: social relations, in particular class struggle/political bargaining power and contradictions.
...For my historical materialist checklist, see this review: A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium
...For a clear presentation of historical materialism, see the “What is Politics?” video lectures. Start from the beginning video, and note these episodes:
-"6. Political Anthropology: When Communism Works and Why"
-"7. The Origins of Male Dominance and Hierarchy; what David Graeber and Jordan Peterson get wrong"
-"7.1 Material Conditions: Why You Can't Eliminate Sexism or Patriarchy by Changing Culture"
-"8. Materialism vs. Idealism: How Social Change Happens"
--Back to Diamond: I am always impressed how we have standardized bad writing (think “textbook” writing). In this case, we took end-of-civilization (literally) material, somehow diluted it from the visceral senses of human/social struggle, vomited the remains onto a canvas, smeared it absent-mindedly to avoid insightful frameworks, and spent 600 pages to watch it all dry. So, a standard textbook treatment of an interesting topic, nothing special (at least it was accessible), but this is just the better half…

The Farcical:
--The farce begins in the second half, on modern times. It's comical when enlightened minds from the great liberal institutions of higher education (judging by the numerous prestigious science awards with Mr. Diamond’s name on them) put their intellect to use on modern social issues. But frankly I expected something a bit more critical from the Geography department; this isn’t Business or American International Relations after all…
--The typical shits-and-giggles of the liberal intelligentsia analyzing environmental destruction in the modern world. “Capitalism” is never even named, while short-term profit-maximization from reckless legally-mandatory plundering is portrayed as irrational behavior because long-term costs exceed short-term gain for both the public and the plunderers. Scintillating analysis

--Nothing on capitalism’s perfectly rational (for the laws of capitalism) profit-seeking behavior of externalizing costs, where environment is an obvious candidate to take the burden (as well as poor people/countries, more on this later). Try:
-Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System
-The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power
--Nothing on the market economy’s value system that prioritizes exchange-value (market price) over use-value, thus rampant commodification and waste. Ex. a forest has no market exchange-value (despite tremendous use-value) until it is:
a) Cut down and sold as commodities.
b) On fire (firefighting services as economic transactions).
c) Privatized and sold for speculation on financial markets, enclosing the “Commons” and kicking others out to create artificial scarcity. This is, after all, how the land market was created (“The Enclosures”) which also created the labour market (dispossessed serfs with nothing left but to sell their labour) and thus capitalism (the “market society”). “Green Capitalism” is the fresh new Enclosures to further expand capitalist market commodification/private property (ex. carbon offset markets).
...Just picture Diamond prancing down this last path, chanting the “Tragedy of the Commons” myth about how Commons (cooperation) is actually the unsustainable social relation because of free-riders. This completely neglects the diversity of Commons social arrangements spanning across cultures and time (Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action), as Commons cooperation is confused with open-access under capitalism (which ironically promotes free-riding, i.e. individual short-term maximization at social cost: https://youtu.be/xcwXME-PNuE )
-Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
-Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails

--There is one sentence on how executives are legally obligated to maximize profits, immediately followed by placing the responsibility on the public to protest. So, a child’s perception of power structures, got it. “Democracy” is just Western political democracy's political theater with periodic token elections, whereas economic democracy is scrubbed from consciousness (replaced with consumer choice “free market”, hooray!).
-Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present
-The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement
-Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism

--If my use of "liberal" confuses you, I'm referring to liberal economics:
1) Clinton's smiling rhetoric but economic property rights/social power/funding still perpetuates one-dollar-one-vote. Refuses to acknowledge the dangers of accumulated wealth (i.e. money-power, money making money), the profitability of wars/imperialism/debt peonage/externalizing costs, etc.
2) The imperialism of private accumulation, i.e. Lockean property rights of those who developed the land deserve to own it. I mean, there's the whole genocidal displacement and colonial destruction of competition to challenge the idea of "development". But even if we accept "development", the serfs who were kicked off their land and forced into the labour market, the plantation slaves and indentured "coolies" and today's global division of labor, i.e. the backbone of industrialization/production, what sliver of the pie do they own?
...Diamond’s portrayal of the modern world is that of independent nations. Zero sense of the global division of labor and imperialism. Literally, unequal trade deals are blamed on “unsophisticated” poor countries making bad deals with sophisticated rich countries. Enough!

--Accessible intro to imperialism "kicking away the ladder":
-The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions
-The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry
-Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism

--Deeper dives:
-foundational: Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital
-Debt: The First 5,000 Years
-Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present
-Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
-The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World
-The Veins of the South Are Still Open: Debates Around the Imperialism of Our Time

The esteemed Jared Diamond, author of one of the most insightful and profound books of the previous decade: Guns Germs and Steel, tried to break the wave of his success on Collapse, a book about the failure of societies due to a laundry-list of (mostly environmental) issues. It’s too soon to render a verdict on the bearded Professor (unlike Paul Ehrlich and Rachel Carson) since he wisely chose topics which cannot be gauged within a human lifetime but the book itself was a real steaming pile of environmental compost. I can’t resist quoting Fred L. Smith Jr. of the Competitive Enterprise Institute: "[a] jumble of jigsaw puzzle pieces laid out on the table - no structure, no serious organization." Indeed, I was so pissed after reading this book that I wanted to rip out all 592 pages and use every single one to give the author paper cuts between his toes. Then set him out barefoot on the New Guinea lowlands about which he can’t seem to shut the flock up. But this is a book review and I digress because I’m getting all worked up again so I’m going to end this paragraph prematurely: *SPURT*

Yeah, we’re kinda fucked.

The thesis here is that the success or failure of any culture depends upon five factors:

Climate change,
Environmental preservation or degradation,
The presence of friendly external trade partners,
The presence of external enemies, and finally,
That society's ability and willingness to respond to the previous four factors.

To develop his theory, Diamond discusses about a dozen different societies, past and present, which had experienced various combinations of troubles with the first four factors, and each of which had responded differently to the challenges that it faced.

In describing the collapse of the society on Easter Island, he ponders what might have been going through the mind of the man who chopped down the very last of the trees that had been utterly indispensable to their civilization at its height. Diamond reasons that as the tree population declined slowly over the course of several generations, its importance in building and commerce likewise diminished, so that by the time only a handful remained, the once vital trees would have seemed nearly valueless. That woodsman would therefore most likely have had no idea how important those trees had been to his great grandparents and would have had no reason to understand the significance of destroying the last one.

In discussing the collapse of the Viking colony in Greenland, Diamond observes that the Vikings might have survived and flourished had they befriended their Inuit neighbors, and learned from them how to cope with the worsening climate. (Unfortunately for the Vikings, Greenland happened to have been uncharacteristically warm during their early years there, and they had no way of knowing that that warm period was to be short-lived.) The Norse colonists might, for example, have tried to copy the kayaks that served the Inuit so well for fishing. Instead, the Vikings looked down on the Inuit as inferiors and pagans (at this point the Norse had converted to Christianity), and clung vainly to a Northern European way of life that was unworkable in Greenland.

(The two examples above are only small samples of their respective sections of the book; neither represents the totality of those sections' arguments.)

Diamond concludes the book on a note of cautious optimism for the modern world's global society. With the advantages of our knowledge of past societies, and our modern technologies (and our understanding of the unintended consequences inherent in all technology), the world can overcome all of the political and environmental crises existing today, provided that governments and big business' are willing to respond intelligently to those crises. He adds that the only way they will have that will is if they're guided by conscientious voters and consumers.

شما بگو 10 بار خوندن لازمه ، من میگم کمه
ملتی که محیط زیست نداره نَه "محیط" داره نَه زیست
یعنی کلا زندگی تعطیل و این یعنی فروپاشی

در خوانشِ بار دوم، ریویویِ تکمیل تری مد نظر خواهم داشت، به شرط حیات و حوصله

The author of this book was extremely long-winded, so I am going to do the opposite with this review and keep it short and simple.

I went into this read excited by the content. I love history and I love little known history even more. This book was a blend of past, present and future regarding how humans are affecting the planet. The basic premise was good and the examples the author chose to write about were perfect. I rank the chapters that discussed Easter Island, various other islands and Greenland’s Viking colony the highest because they were fascinating. The other chapters contained some interesting information too but weren’t as engaging. I kept dozing off while reading them and considered skimming through them more times than I care to admit.

Three stars to a book that needed a few hundred pages of unnecessary extra removed from it.

This is a major work. Diamond looks in detail at the factors at play in the demise of civilizations in human history, using a wide range of examples. He offers a framework in which to structure the analysis and looks in great detail at possible (and in many cases certain) reasons why various societies collapsed. He is not a one-note analyst. All problems do not fit the same mold. There is considerable nuance and common sense brought to bear on this examination. Foolishness plays a part, greed, corruption. But just as frequently, the actors behave rationally. Maybe they were unaware or could not possibly be aware of the larger implications of their actions. Maybe the land in which they lived was ill-suited to large numbers of humans. Maybe changes in climate made what seemed a reasonable place a death trap. Clearly an analysis of why societies failed in the past, with particular attention to environmental issues, has direct relevance to our world today. For example, Polynesian islands that were dependant on resources from other islands collapsed when their import supply dried up. That has relevance to oil-dependant first world nations today, for example. Diamond goes out of his way to make a case that business is business and they are not in the business of performing charity or taking responsibility for the common weal. He does point out that some businesses have been instrumental in forcing improvements in producers. He cited Home Depot and BP among others, although I expect he might have second thoughts about the latter's net impact.

I found the book to be extremely eye-opening and informative. It was a long, slow read, but well worth the effort. It makes my short list of must read for anyone seriously interested in current affairs.

Several straw men were sacrificed to make this book possible.

Extensive study on what are the main factors that force societies to collapse and others not collapse.

Can be used build studies on modern day societies collapse also.

I can't believe that people think Collapse is readable.

It was quite the book to read at this time when the doomsday clock has advanced almost to midnight. No civilization is immune to collapse and we are arrogant if we think it will never happen here. We have no unified policies with humanities' interests at heart. The book is depressing and uplifting at the same time. Just as civilizations can collapse, so too they can survive. My greatest hope is that the world realizes that the Earth is a closed system, that resources do have a limit, that not everything is renewable, and that not all problems can be solved with more technology.

Extremely repetitive, inadequately researched, highly speculative, and overly assertive. Jared Diamond clearly knows a lot about some things, but he seems to think he knows a lot about everything. And he gets a lot wrong, at least on the things I know something about (Easter Island, for example, where his Collapse hypothesis is generally regarded by people who actually study the island's history and prehistory as wildly off-base and unsupported by evidence).

This book was clearly written by someone who had a theory (Collapse) and went looking for evidence to justify it. Fine, I suppose, but that's the opposite of a scientific approach (examine evidence and search for a theory to explain it).

Stylistically, his tendency to repeat every point two or three or four times might be helpful in the classroom, but it's irritating to read.

Overall, my strong recommendation is not to bother with this book. Seriously, it's almost impossible to distinguish between the assertions that are supported by evidence and accepted by experts and those that are just Jared Diamond's speculation. Unfortunately, this hit the bestseller list and lots of his speculation became accepted by intelligent people who don't happen to be experts.