Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Jared Diamond’s “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” is a follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize winning book “Guns, Germs and Steel”. In “Collapse” the author explores how climate change, the population explosion and political discord create the conditions for the collapse of civilization. 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.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?