About this title: The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Guns, Germs, and Steel" examines the downfall of some of history's greatest civilizations. Abridged. 5 CDs.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: n/a
Publisher: Viking Penguin Audio, New York, New York, U.S.A.
Date Published: 2004
ISBN-13:9780143057185ISBN:0143057189
Description: Fine in Very Good jacket. Audio CD. 16mo-over 5¾"-6¾" tall. 8 Audio CDs in cardboard sleeves within black and white pictorial cardboard box show no obvious signs of wear. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Date Published: 2006
ISBN-13:9780140279511ISBN:0140279512
Description: New. Talks about the mysterious collapse of past civilizations-and what this means for the future. Bringing together evidence from many sources and piecing together the myriad influences, from climate to culture, that make societies self-destruct, this b... read more
Description: New. DISPATCHED FROM UNITED KINGDOM. NO EXPEDITED SHIPPING! Please note orders are confirmed immediately and may take 2-3 business days to ship. This processing time is in addition to the shipping time. Please allow 10-14 days for delivery. Brand new item. Order now. Selling online since 1995. Order with confidence. Code: G20091122101337D. read more
Description: (Camberwell), Allen Lane, (2005). Reprint. Wrappers, maps, illust., pp. xi, 575. Paper sl. browned else fine. ISBN 0-7139-9862-8. By the author of the influential GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL. read more
Edition: Abridged
Binding: Audiobook CD
Publisher: PENGUIN GROUP
Date Published: 2005
ISBN-13:9780143057185ISBN:0143057189
Description: New. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Guns, Germs, and Steel" examines the downfall of some of history's greatest civilizations. Abridged. 5 CDs. read more
Description: Like New. SHIPS FROM GERMANY. NO EXPEDITED SHIPPING! Allow 10-14 business days for delivery. Please always check the language in the product description section. Few left in stock-order soon. Selling online since 1995. Code: L20091122205143I. read more
Binding: Audio CD
Publisher: Penguin Audio
Date Published: 2004
ISBN-13:9780143057185ISBN:0143057189
Description: New. Brand New! Buy with confidence-your satisfaction is guaranteed at B-Logistics! Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. Please note that Expedited shipping is not available at this time. read more
"Before we had federal wiretaps, the Académie Française, or Club Libby Lu, we had to figure out what plants to grow in what combinations to provide nourishment, what animals we could domesticate without getting trampled, and how to organize ourselves to make life safe and fulfilling--achievements that are not less interesting and probably more so for being invisible to us today.
At length I have finished the last piece of reading material I picked up for (during, actually) my trip to Oregon: Jared Diamond's most recent book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. I believe I read his last book, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies before I started this journal (!), so I'll start with a word on that. The purpose of that book was to furnish a nonracist explanation of why some peoples seem to have a lot of complicated culture, technology, and, for lack of a better word, booty, while others don't. Diamond concludes that this has much to do with the environments these societies started in: what plants and animals they had available for attempted domestication, what terrain and climate they had to contend with, what political structures and religions eventually grew up, and so forth. Diamond is about 70 years old and seems to have spent his entire life reading and traveling at a frantic pace, which makes him able to synthesize information and themes at a much higher level than most responsibly cautious historians or scientists. It seems unlikely, but he manages to make topics like paleoethnobotany and livestock diseases fascinating.
In Collapse, he takes the muted environmental themes of the first book and gives them a more current spin. He describes a series of societies that have experienced collapse (complete depopulation, ruinous collapse of social order, or the flight of most inhabitants) and ties their fates to the degradation of their environment. For example, the Norse arrived in Greenland and commenced farming, logging, and livestock herding, not realizing until it was too late that Greenland's soil productivity and rate of timber growth were much lower than in Norway, and that they'd spent down most of their environmental capital in just a few short years. Their settlement clung to the coast, at a subsistence level, for about five hundred years until things got so bad they resorted to eating their dogs and dismantling homes for firewood--then they disappeared. He also talks about modern societies like Rwanda, showing how genocide appeared there even in ethnically homogeneous areas as the result of overpopulation and resulting feuds over land scarcity. Near the end of the book, two maps are presented, "Political trouble spots of the modern world" and "Environmental trouble spots of the modern world": the same map printed twice with different titles.
Diamond is somewhat better at writing about history thousands of years old than he is writing about the present, and given the short history (so far) of our present environmental problems, he has a lot less to work with than when he's writing about thousands of years of history at once. It's not surprising that this book is a bit less persuasive. Still, there are some points that score, such as his theme of societies needing to decide which of their core values they can afford to keep. The Greenland Norse clung to their identities as European Christians, expending lots of effort and material goods on supporting a bishop and church and refusing to emulate successful Inuit hunting practices. One might ask whether Americans' self-image as mobile, independent people who love their cars is one that we ought to cling to.
In both books, Diamond displays a contagious love and respect for the places and people he has studied. It's hard to come away from his work without feeling awed by the achievements of ancient peoples or wanting to visit Australia, Japan, Montana, Polynesia, Greenland, or numerous other places. In addition to being works of history, his books feel like travel books or memoirs."
"I thought this book was great. Really thought provoking. Discussing various civilizations and how they 'chose' to fail or succeed. Some societies chose to not assimilate into the cultures they joined or adapt to the lands in which they traveled to and they paid the price through the collapse of their society. They chose to grow traditional crops from their homelands, even if the land would not sustain them. They chose to not live like or associate with the 'heathen' outsiders of the new lands and thus did not learn the skills necessary to survive the winters and environmental hardships of that new, unknown land.
Other societies made choices to survive. They chose to limit their populations through birth control and continuous expedition when they knew they lived in lands with scarce resources. They chose to not deplete their resources. They chose to assimilate and learn from people that did know how to survive. They knew that if they did not find a way to adapt to their environs or to work with other peoples, then no one would survive, or at least their society would not survive.
Societies survive when they make sustainable choices. Societies collapse when they chose to deplete their resources, live beyond their means, and refuse to adapt to the world around them.
Very interesting to look at the societies that have failed and those that have succeeded. What can we learn from these societies? What are we doing to make sure we are not making the same mistakes that lead to collapse? Which path are we on?"
"Really this is probably a four star book. It is a well researched and very informative book about the collapse of societies past, present, and future, due to environmental factors. Though I was glad that I read it,I do have some nitpicking to do around the subject of its inaccessible length and repetitive nature. In general, it is not a very readable book. For all of his desire to make these ideas about our environmental peril known to the general public, he has written a rather dry (parched dry -- really, really dry) and academic tome. If this book was any longer, we would have been into mulitiple volumes. I found myself saying, "Alright, I get it -- lets move on..." And as long as I am nitpicking, the pictures that came as an insert in the middle of the book -- pictures being the key way to grab the attention of the difficult reader -- were almost an afterthought. These pictures, which seem like a small thing, were really a symbol of how out of touch Diamond is with what drives those he might want to convince. Not only were they hard to tie to the text in some cases, but when they were tied to the text, half the time it was to a part of the text that was relatively uninteresting. That being said, I did feel very glad that I had read the book. His methodical approach leaves you feeling very sure that the environmental problems he poses are real and that the danger is eminent. If you weren't going to read the whole book, at least read the chapter with his rebuttals of the one liner excuses that most people give for not caring about the environment... He has done a good job writing this book in so many ways -- but has missed an opportunity to reach out of the echochamber of already-environmentally-concerned into the regions of the environmental-heathen.
There are lots of other things that you could say about this book. It is fodder for a semster worth of discussions. However, thats jsut its problem -- it is written like a text book."
"This is a difficult book to give one rating to. Some parts of it deserve four or five stars, some parts deserve one or two. Generally, Collapse lacks the consistency of Diamond's most well known book, Guns, Germs and Steel. Where Guns, Germs and Steel is nearly intuitive in the simpleness but universal applicability of its principles, Collapse is episodic and fractured. Diamond's basic thesis is that societies in ecologically fragile environments "choose" to succeed or fail based on how willing they are to adopt to their environment, and how conscience they are of environmental change.
I was very interested in the sections about the collapse of the Easter Island society, as well as Diamond's extended discussion of the Greenland Norse. There are also some chilling examples of island societies that disappeared entirely. Modern examples of collapses include Rwanda and Haiti.
The book started boring me towards the end, when Diamond stops telling the story of particular societies and begins to expound at length about the principles that unite these examples. It quickly becomes clear that there are as many or more principles and factors as there are examples in the book.
Overall, I would recommend reading sections of this book, but not the whole thing. If you are someone who cannot stop reading a book once you get into it, you should probably avoid Collapse, as it will trap you."
We guarantee every item's condition, as described on Alibris. If you are not satisfied that an item is as described, return your purchase for a refund.
rating
