Collapse, Jared Diamond
Collapse, Jared Diamond
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Collapse

Author: Jared Diamond

Narrator: Christopher Murney

Abridged: 9 hr 31 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Penguin Audio

Published: 12/01/2004


Synopsis

In Jared Diamond’s follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize–winning Guns, Germs and Steel, the author explores how climate change, the population explosion, and political discord create the conditions for the collapse of civilization.

Environmental damage, climate change, globalization, rapid population growth, and unwise political choices were all factors in the demise of societies around the world, but some found solutions and persisted. As in Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond traces the fundamental pattern of catastrophe, and weaves an all-encompassing global thesis through a series of fascinating historical-cultural narratives. Collapse moves from the Polynesian cultures on Easter Island to the flourishing American civilizations of the Anasazi and the Maya and finally to the doomed Viking colony on Greenland. Similar problems face us today and have already brought disaster to Rwanda and Haiti, even as China and Australia are trying to cope in innovative ways. Despite our own society’s apparently inexhaustible wealth and unrivaled political power, ominous warning signs have begun to emerge even in ecologically robust areas like Montana.

Brilliant, illuminating, and immensely absorbing, Collapse is destined to take its place as one of the essential books of our time, raising the urgent question: How can our world best avoid committing ecological suicide?

About The Author

Jared Diamond is a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. He began his scientific career in physiology and expanded into evolutionary biology and biogeography. Among his many awards are the National Medal of Science, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, Japan’s Cosmos Prize, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and the Lewis Thomas Prize honoring the Scientist as Poet, presented by The Rockefeller University. His previous books include Why Is Sex Fun?, The Third Chimpanzee, Collapse, The World Until Yesterday, and Guns, Germs, and Steel, winner of the Pulitzer Prize.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Manny on June 11, 2015

Jared Diamond looks at several societies that have collapsed as a result of misusing their natural resources, plus a couple (Tokugawa period Japan is the star example) that miraculously managed to pull back from the brink. At the end, he also talks about some present-day cases where we still don't k......more

Goodreads review by Kevin on November 06, 2024

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 go......more

Goodreads review by Mario the lone bookwolf on January 31, 2020

Terrifying how often the pattern of exploitation of nature and decline of cultures has repeated itself. The fitting additional book to Diamonds work "Guns Germs and Steel" offers past and present scenarios of various environmental conditions and the mastery or miserable failure of the peoples trying......more

Goodreads review by Will on April 03, 2014

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 societi......more

Goodreads review by Kenghis on July 25, 2007

The Pulitzer-prize winning "Guns, Germs and Steel" by this dude forever changed the way I look at history. And believe me, I am a history buff of sorts so this means a lot. Unfortunately, "Collapse" fails to measure up to that classic. The real problem with Collapse isn't the research that goes into......more


Quotes

"Mr. Diamond...is a lucid writer with an ability to make arcane scientific concepts readiily accesible to the lay reader, and his case studies of failed cultures are never less than compelling."—The New York Times"...Collapse is a magisterial effort packed with insight and written with clarity and enthusiasm."—Businessweek"Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse represent one of the most significant projects embarked upon by any intellectual of our generation. They are magnificent books: extraordinary in erudition and originality, compelling in their ability to relate the digitized pandemonium of the present to the hushed agrarian sunrises of the far past. I read both thinking what literature might be like if every author knew so much, wrote so clearly and formed arguments with such care."—Gregg Easterbrook, The New York Times Book Review


Awards

  • Quill Award