Diamond contends it was chance, not culture or brainpower, that brought industrial power first to Europe Western civilization has nothing to boast about.
The thesis of the first part is that environmental coincidences are the principal factor in human history. "Collapse" may be read alone, but begins where "Guns, Germs, and Steel" ended: essentially the two form a single 1,000-page book. Diamond also studied the application of natural-selection theory to physiology, and in 1999 received a National Medal of Science for that work, which is partly reflected in his book "Why Is Sex Fun?" (Sex is fun the book is serious.) Today Diamond often returns to the Pacific rim, especially Australia, where in the outback one may still hear the rustle of distant animal cries just as our forebears heard them in the far past. Initially he specialized in conservation biology, studying bird diversity in New Guinea in 1985 he won one of the early MacArthur "genius grants." Gradually he began to wonder why societies of the western Pacific islands never developed the metallurgy, farming techniques or industrial production of Eurasia. Because this view, too, is exactly what postmodernism longs to hear, "Collapse" may prove influential as well.īorn in Boston in 1937, Diamond is a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Now "Collapse" posits that the Western way of life is flirting with the sudden ruin that caused past societies like the Anasazi and the Mayans to vanish. Its conclusion, that Western success was a coincidence driven by good luck, has proven extremely influential in academia, as the view is quintessentially postmodern. "Guns" asked why the West is atop the food chain of nations. All of which makes the two books exasperating, because both come to conclusions that are probably wrong.
I read both thinking what literature might be like if every author knew so much, wrote so clearly and formed arguments with such care. 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. Taken together, "Guns, Germs, and Steel" and "Collapse" represent one of the most significant projects embarked upon by any intellectual of our generation. Now he has written a sequel, "Collapse," which asks whether present nations can last. "Guns, Germs, and Steel" won a Pulitzer Prize, then sold a million copies, astonishing for a 480-page volume of archeological speculation on how the world reached its present ordering of nations. $29.95.ĮIGHT years ago Jared Diamond realized what is, for authors, increasingly a fantasy - he published a serious, challenging and complex book that became a huge commercial success. COLLAPSE How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.
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