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green

Overall, I think this is a good book but not outstanding. In this book, Jared Diamond examines the reasons why societies fail. There are many reasons, but he lists five factors as being critical. I won't list them here because you should read the book.

Next, he went on to illustrate the cases of eight or ten people's whose civilizations collapsed. My problem with the book, is that he has chosen places that are remote and are ecologically fragile. He examined why the Vikings in Greenland died out, but not why the Vikings in Shetland survive.

Neither has he written about a civilization in an ecologically stable place that has collapsed.

To me, this is a weakness of the book. ( )

paperback

This was a better read than Guns, Steel and Germs because it covered more topics and wasn't repetitious. His concise history of Easter Island, Iceland, Greenland, (including the Viking discovery of North America) and the Anasazi was new to me -- much of the histories of these places has been pieced together over the last forty years apparently. Another theme was resource exhaustion which was an important cause of many societies collapsing. Alarming was the discussion of how resource exhaustion -- topsoil, trees, fisheries -- in the world today is accelerating exponentially. And the entire world now is more like Easter Island -- people can't move somewhere else nor can help come from outside. ( )