If I could give this negative stars I would. Just another example of Jared Diamond writing a book on something he doesn't know anything about, and spinning narratives that are harmful and dangerous into palatable books for public consumption.

holy F am i glad that this is over. i hate to criticise because when was the last time that i wrote a 500+ page interdisciplinary tome as a follow-up to a Pulitzer Prize-winner? nevertheless, this book has serious flaws.

i did learn a lot - not only historical facts and profiles of ancient and existing societies, but also about how environmental problems actually wreak their damage, and how the mining, oil, coal and other industries operate.

my main complaint about this book is that it very quickly becomes entirely unreadable. it's one the most painful, repetitive, loquacious, disorganised trudges that i've had to suffer through since attempting Fraser's 'The Golden Bough'. this book is in need of further editing. it could have been refined to half its current length without diminishing its strengths. in fact, 'Collapse' reads like two books - one on the role of the environment on societal collapses and another on how environmental damage is affecting the world at present.

another gripe, more personal, is that he assumes too much of his audience, i.e. that we're all a bunch of speciesist capitalists.

also, despite a veneer of open-minded, cosmopolitan worldliness, i could not help feeling that the book contains culturally insensitive content, e.g. repeatedly referring to Native Americans as Indians and to developing countries as the Third World, and that Diamond is somehow reluctantly restraining himself when he writes about immigration and 'Third World' countries adopting 'First World' standards.

my advice: read the intro, maybe the first chapter, then the final chapter, and you're good.

i'm looking forward to liberating more space on the shelf. when i first began reading 'Collapse', i was planning on reading 'Guns, Germs and Steel' next, but forget that. i need some sci-fi vampires to recover.

If you care about the world and the survival of the human race, then you must read this book. Period. Buy it now.

It will teach you more than you ever thought possible in one book. You will look at the world differently. It will expand your mind.

- Lilo
Author of The Light Who Shines

And just to be technically correct, this is not a review. It is a recommendation.

Citizen Diamond is clearly a middle-of-the-road centrist who thinks that both sides have good points - and thus aggravates me to no end. Which is a shame, as I truly enjoy most of his other books. Over and over again, he defends businesses, their practices, and the people who run them because "they exist to make money" and seems to believe that this excuses their actions because there is no other way that we could ever possibly get anything done without allowing someone to make money by exploiting the people underneath them and destroying everything around them. He also seems to be a champion of regulated capitalism and American democracy as the only way to get anything done because of the "failed experiment" of the Soviet Union.

You know, it's funny, no one says banks are a "failed experiment" when one of them fails. No one says capitalism is a "failed experiment" when some company goes out of business. No one says democracy is a "failed experiment" when a democratic nation is conquered or undergoes a revolution/civil war. Yet time and time again, Communism is absolutely a failed experiment to these people because one nation failed one time. Completely discounting the fact that the backwards, agrarian nobody that was Imperial Russia in 1914 became a Superpower is less than 50 years whilst suffering the devastation of two world wars. The USA only reaped benefits from WW1 and 2, and yet, the USSR gave us a run for our money. How was this "failed?"

But that's neither here not there.

Citizen Diamond believes that if we just were nice and all had long-term views and drank cocoa around fires with business leaders and government officials that everyone would suddenly act appropriately, we'd all learn we'd need to do less with less, and all live quiet, modest, peasant lifestyles. Citizen Diamond pushes the myth of scarcity, champions Malthusian population ideals, and decries the lifestyle of the average American, whilst completely defending the devastation caused by the lifestyles of the top 1%...who, you know, are just trying to make everyone money, so we should really get off their backs, because you know, money.

His research into past societal collapses is just fine, and he points out what they did wrong interestingly. You can learn a lot from the fall of the Norse in Greenland, or "Easter Island," or the Maya, or the "Anasazi." You can also read about failures and successes in the Polynesian sphere. However, when he comes to modern societies, he spends a little bit of time discussing China, and a lot of time discussing Australia. He, of course, says it's because Australia is a First-World Country - unlike China - which, wow, I mean, in the actual Cold War definition of the First-World, Second-World, Third-World terms, he is correct, but you can tell that he means it in the completely Euro-centric viewpoint. He seem to think that we can not sympathize with China as they are "alien foreigners" (my impression), even though he goes on to explain how Australians can only live in very large cities or very small towns, as there isn't the infrastructure or resources on the continent to supply a medium-sized city. As a resident of a "medium-sized city" in a nation full of medium-sized cities, I can't relate to that experience. I bet China's got a lot of those, however.

This was a shame, for as I've said, I really like most of his other works and agree with his viewpoints, but his apparent faith in the western/American way of life as the solution for the future for everyone everywhere (as long as we regulate it and educated ourselves and learn control - you know, all those things that are highly valued in America *he says with a note of sarcasm*) is extraordinarily disappointing. He even uses the example of the Dutch and their collective concern for each other because of their need to maintain their sea walls, lest they all drown - seeming to believe that Americans are just one campfire-cocoa-chat away from becoming perfect collectivists...