Thanksgiving Reading Book Review

Collapsed

Wait, is it okay to do a book review of a book you never finished? Of corse it is- that's why we all love blogs!!! Well, this weekend, I read parts of Jared Diamond's (of Subway fame) book called Collapse. Jared Diamond is known for an earlier book, Guns Germs and Steel that is, I think, a work of genius. Unfortunately, Collapse isn't. In Guns Diamond applied a unique yet not overly complicated thesis to 13,000 years of history. To sum up, he proposed that due to the surplus of food and time, agricultural peoples gain the necessary means (like guns and germs) to overtake other societies. And what makes them agricultural is not brains or morals or lack of either, but the specific environment they live in. For me, Guns was both the first science book I ever understood and an incredible way of looking at history.

In Collapse, Diamond also has a thesis. This time it's that cultures have fallen due to mishandling their environment. This is sort of similar to his last book, but this time it feels less interesting, since they kind of did or didn't. I also felt like he was going too far out of his way to remind us that this means that we could destroy our society similalry. I mean, I agree with this, but now what? For instance, he writes about how Easter Island probably collapsed due to them cutting down all of their trees. And then says (in a chapter titled "Easter Island as a Metaphor"), due to globalism the whole earth is just like an island floating in the galaxy. Okay... I guess so since we can't trade with Mars, but... I wouldn't say it's a great comparison. A people cutting down their last tree because they are stranded in the middle of an ocean seems very different from us who cut down trees because we can get them elsewhere. Today, I'm not cutting down the last tree, I'm just not going to notice when it happens. And why does he need to reach so far? Can't we all just agree that cutting down all of our trees is a bad thing?

Another problem is that he goes way too anthropological on our asses and it makes it much harder to read. As grandma always said, a little bit about radio carbon dating references goes a long way. A lot of it leaves one brain dead. In his defense, I skipped the intro and first chapter and then only made it through two chapters. Who knows what I missed (the opening chapter for some reason focuses on fly fishing in Montana). Also, in the chapters I did read, I did find out interesting info. I think I'll use it by just occassionally learning about one of the cultures' demise. Still, overall, both in readibility and purpose it comes nowhere close to Guns Germs and Steel.