Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [0]
PENGUIN BOOKS
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
PART ONE - MODERN MONTANA
CHAPTER 1 - Under Montana’s Big Sky
PART TWO - PAST SOCIETIES
CHAPTER 2 - Twilight at Easter
CHAPTER 3 - The Last People Alive: Pitcairn and Henderson Islands
CHAPTER 4 - The Ancient Ones: The Anasazi and Their Neighbors
CHAPTER 5 - The Maya Collapses
CHAPTER 6 - The Viking Prelude and Fugues
CHAPTER 7 - Norse Greenland’s Flowering
CHAPTER 8 - Norse Greenland’s End
CHAPTER 9 - Opposite Paths to Success
PART THREE - MODERN SOCIETIES
CHAPTER 10 - Malthus in Africa: Rwanda’s Genocide
CHAPTER 11 - One Island, Two Peoples, Two Histories: The Dominican Republic ...
CHAPTER 12 - China, Lurching Giant
CHAPTER 13 - “Mining” Australia
PART FOUR - PRACTICAL LESSONS
CHAPTER 14 - Why Do Some Societies Make Disastrous Decisions?
CHAPTER 15 - Big Businesses and the Environment: Different Conditions, ...
CHAPTER 16 - The World as a Polder: What Does It All Mean to Us Today?
AFTERWORD
Acknowledgements
FURTHER READINGS
INDEX
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
PENGUIN BOOKS
COLLAPSE
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. He has been elected to the National Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. Among Dr. Diamond’s 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. He has published more than two hundred articles in Discover, Natural History, Nature, and Geo magazines. His previous books include The Third Sex and The Third Chimpanzee. His most recent book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
Chosen as Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Economiser, and Discover
Praise for Collapse
“Extraordinary in erudition and originality, compelling in [its] ability to relate the digitized pandemonium of the present to the hushed agrarian sunrises of the far past.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Readers learn on page 1 that they are in for quite a ride. No reader may carp that Diamond has provided a set of examples that is too limited chronologically or geographically. Diamond . . . has been to most of the lands cited, often staying for months or even years, and what he writes about them and their populations is informed and engagingly colored by personal observation. The Icelanders . . . learned to face up to reality and adapt to living within the limits of their environments. Jared Diamond has written a book to help us do the same.”
—Los Angeles Times
“With Collapse, Jared Diamond has written a fascinating account of the collapse of civilizations around the world.... A reader cannot help but leave the book wondering whether we are following the track of these other civilizations that failed. Any reader of Collapse will leave the book convinced that we must take steps now to save our planet.”
—The Boston Globe
“In a world that celebrates live journalism, we are increasingly in need of big-picture authors like Jared Diamond, who think historically and spacially—across an array of disciplines—to make sense of events that journalists may seem to be covering in depth, but in fact aren’t. . . . Thank heavens there is someone of the stature of Diamond willing to say so.”
—Robert D. Kaplan, The Washington Post
“Diamond looks to the past and present to sound a warning for the future.”
—Newsweek
“Rendering complex history and science into entertaining prose, Diamond reminds us that those who ignore history are bound to repeat it.”
—People (four stars)
“Taken together Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse represent one of the most significant projects embarked upon by any intellectual