My take-away from this difficult but absolutely important book is that we urgently need to change the ways in which we think, and in which we make our collective decisions.

This book was written 12 years ago, which is frightening enough, and even then, what he described seemed overwhelming. He does a monumental job of synthesizing and analyzing data from key cultures all over the world at different times, looking at what worked and didn't work from a long-term survival point of view, and asking (a bit like the questions asked by Cook in A Brief History of the Human Race ) why these various societies failed or succeeded.

Most instructive, as I see it, are the contrasting examples of Greenlands live Inuits and Dead Norse, and Hispanyola's foresting Dominican Republic and stripped-bare Haiti. He points to collapses, near-collapses, and timely but not necessarily popular policies placed to prevent collapse (particularly well summarized on page 440), and also delves into the problems of mass-manipulation and the related problem of group-think, using the handling of the decision-making processes in the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missle crisis as contrasting examples of how president Kennedy adapted (even stepped out to ensure that they could think without being intimidated by his presence, wow) his governance processes in the small group situation to prevent a recurrence of his error with Bay of Pigs. How rare for a leader to insist that his advisors, and he, change their thinking strategy, and it worked. Unfortunately for the identity-bound Greenland Norse Christians, they were unable to change their thinking, and they died while the Inuits lived, under the very same climatalogical conditions, and with better tools and weapons to boot.
He goes on to answer many oft-cited solutions, like technology, as unable to solve the problems we face, which he lists in 12 major categories, unless we change (as Einstein also said) our ways of thinking, and he also pointed out that much of the problem is one related back to the Tragedy of the Commons (I remember seeing a rebuttal of that issue while working on my phd, but it escapes me) and points out that small-ish Non-anonymous groups often work best at policing themselves democratically (as my conclusions also found regarding small-scale issuance of money in SHARED MONETARY GOVERNANCE: Exploring Regulatory Frameworks, Participatory Internal Decision-making and Scale in Institutional Access to General and Special Purpose Currencies ) -the decision-making process is critical.

He also goes into some statistics that almost began to sound like what David Hackett Fischer talked about in The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History regarding the correlation between societal upheavals and price inflation, which is caused by any number of variables also cited here by Jared Diamond: population pressure and consumption, types of energy being gathered and used and the by-products or externalities and problems caused thereby, inequalities of various kinds, etc.

He stresses that the decisions we make collectively, upon which our lives literally depend, are often made out of a biased or even racist point of view, as with the Greenland Norse who died as civilized European Christians, refusing to learn from or cooperate with the Inuit, who lived. (Ok, maybe they didn't have the choice of cooperating with, but they could surely see that the Inuit ate things that they, the Norse, refused, and also did not keep cows or sheep, which are not good animals to raise in Greenland!)
We therefore, just as both Armstrong in Islam: A Short History and Cook also point out, absolutely must change our ways of viewing and interacting with other cultures. We no longer, as Dr. King said over 40 years ago in Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, have the luxury of not cooperating.
Shira
14 August, 12017 HE
(the Holocene Calendar)

I listened to the abridged audio version of this book. Some of the discs were damaged, and I have no idea what I missed, so I won't rate the book. I wanted to listen to the full-length audio version, but I can't stand that reader's style. You'd have to put a firecracker up his nose to get him to put any inflection in his voice. (Don't forget to light the firecracker. An unlit one would just make him sound even more nasally challenged.)

A lot of what was in this book I already knew from my degree program at university. So the things that were new to me were of course the most interesting. I never would have guessed that Easter Island was once covered with giant coconut palms that are now extinct. The section about Greenland was also new to me, and so telling about prejudices. The Nordic people did not survive there because they were too superior to learn from the Inuit, who continue to thrive.

Before delving into the book, I wondered about the use of the word "choose" in the title. Now I understand how that is true. Societies have often "chosen" to succeed or fail depending on whether they use a top-down or bottom-up form of government and resource management.

This is a collection of fables drawn from human history all demonstrating how certain human societies have either achieved happiness through the wise management of their population and environment or have brought down divine nemesis upon themselves by ignoring overpopulation and the need to protect the environment. Each one of the tales is quite well down.

The seams between the tales are terrible visible and one shakes one's head at the seemingly arbitrary method used to select the stories. In other words, this is a hastily thrown together work designed to capitalize on the momentum in the market place created by Mr. Diamond's previous work: Guns, Germs and Steel.

Read and enjoy it if you have already read the vastly superior Guns, Germs and Steel. If you buy it in a marked-down bin or borrow it from a public library you will resent the crash commercialism of it much less.

Extraordinary in scope. Makes the news far more interesting even than it already was. However, I withhold star 5 because someone should have run the manuscript by me. Many awkward sentences. Too many sentences that aren't, quite. Or that aren't by a long shot. Penguin? Editors? Anyone? Such a noble and otherwise impressive undertaking deserves better care before reaching the public. But yes. A grand and very fine book indeed.