Authors: Jared Diamond
ISBN-13: 9780143036555, ISBN-10: 0143036556
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
Date Published: December 2005
Edition: 1st Edition
Jared Diamond is a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Among Dr. Diamond's many awards are the National Medal of Science, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.
In his million-copy bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond examined how and why Western civilizations developed the technologies and immunities that allowed them to dominate much of the world. Now in this brilliant companion volume, Diamond probes the other side of the equation: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates?
Mr. Diamond - who has academic training in physiology, geography and evolutionary biology - is a lucid writer with an ability to make arcane scientific concepts readily accessible to the lay reader, and his case studies of failed cultures are never less than compelling. He presents some intriguing digressions about methods used by scientists and historians to diagnose the trajectory of long dead societies, and provides some provocative analyses of current environmental problems in Australia, the United States and China.
Prologue : a tale of two farms | 1 | |
Pt. 1 | Modern Montana | 25 |
Ch. 1 | Under Montana's big sky | 27 |
Pt. 2 | Past societies | 77 |
Ch. 2 | Twilight at Easter | 79 |
Ch. 3 | The last people alive : Pitcairn and Henderson Islands | 120 |
Ch. 4 | The ancient ones : the Anasazi and their neighbors | 136 |
Ch. 5 | The Maya collapses | 157 |
Ch. 6 | The Viking prelude and fugues | 178 |
Ch. 7 | Norse Greenland's flowering | 211 |
Ch. 8 | Norse Greenland's end | 248 |
Ch. 9 | Opposite paths to success | 277 |
Pt. 3 | Modern societies | 309 |
Ch. 10 | Malthus in Africa : Rwanda's genocide | 311 |
Ch. 11 | One Island, two peoples, two histories : the Dominican Republic and Haiti | 329 |
Ch. 12 | China, lurching giant | 358 |
Ch. 13 | "Mining" Australia | 378 |
Pt. 4 | Practical lessons | 417 |
Ch. 14 | Why do some societies make disastrous decisions? | 419 |
Ch. 15 | Big businesses and the environment : different conditions, different outcomes | 441 |
Ch. 16 | The world as a polder : what does it all mean to us today? | 486 |