Wade read and liked Kman's review of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed:

"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 cla...more 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 the thesis, or even the soundness of the thesis itself (though there are some qualms I have about how politically unstable Mongolia is or basing his analysis of cod fisheries on a single popular accunt). The central contention, that population explosion, interdependency, unsustainable harvest, adverse cultural values, and about 8 other factors contributed to a society's collapse, is innocuous enough, though admittedly somewhat vague. Rather, the problem is that Diamond is so intent upon clearly and explicitly detailing every freaking argument to paint a convincing picture of the ancient/medieval societies or the current polluting industries that he often loses sight of his larger arguments. For instance, his discussion of Viking Greenland v. Iceland is insightful but whether it warrants nearly 100 pages in a 500 page book I doubt. The same could be said of his discussion of modern Australia; China, in contrast, gets really short shrift. He goes at pain to explicate the archaeological evidence by which we understand the Anasazi collapse, but here too he gets a little repetitive and locquacious. For instance, the logic behind dendrochronolgy and salinization were explained more than once to elucidate yet another nuance. Indeed, here Diamond the scientist persistently gets in the way of Diamond the popular writer. Were it not for his stellar writing skills this would have been even more of a chore to read.

Apart from the lack of effective editing, Collapse suffers from Diamond's penchant to almost bend over backward to point out that he is not engaged in a crude form of "Environmental determinism" whereby the significance of cultural and political events are misleadingly downplayed. He certainly didn't do this in Guns Germs and Steel but many people, including the NY Times, accuse him of it. Nevertheless Diamond was sufficiently sensitive to this interpretation (as well as eager to show that we can prevent environmental catastrophe) that he repeats this ad nauseum and, IMHO, belabors this point to being beyond repetitive.

The cumulative effect of all these shortcomings is that the book ends up presenting really rather very little that is new, argues persistently against straw man hypotheses, and is informative but almost in a trivial sense. At 520 odd dense pages this is a lot to ask of a reader, and it is a pity that this simply does not measure up to Diamond's earlier works.(less) "