How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

by Jared Diamond

 

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning 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. In graduate school, the dialectic "every civilization contains the seeds of its own destruction" seemed very theoretical; decades later, with the perils of technology-caused climate change ever more dangerous, it seems all too real. In this book Jared Diamond examines the infamous rot of several past societies as cautionary tales for our own era, but he holds a glimmer of hope for the modern world in its unique ability to question, to seek, to experiment.