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A review by clarareads1000books
Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis by Jared Diamond
3.0
Despite a few paragraphs and points of view that frustrated me very much in this book, I did enjoy it and learned a lot overall. If you take it as a brief history of 7 random nations, rather than an analysis of how countries deal with crises, there is a lot of interesting stuff in this book.
For example, I did not know anything about the Pinochet regime in Chile, the details of the Meiji period in Japan, Finland's Winter War or post-war Australian society. Because we do a bit of a trip around the world, you don't get bored, as every country has a very unique and fascinating history, and Diamond does touch on many aspects and recounts these histories well.
On the other hand, the book relies on too much anecdotic evidence to really convince me about the broad conclusions regarding how these countries dealt well or not well with their respective crises and what that means regarding nations and crises in general and for the future world. I feel like the opinion of a country having dealt "well" or "not well" with a crisis is often based on subjective factors and personal opinions (Diamond clearly loves Finland, therefore paints its "Finlandization" rather positively, while kind of hating on Chile and blaming a democratic government for the subsequent terrible regime of Pinochet).
It is obviously quite clearly written for Americans, which is a bit annoying (e.g. "Finland has as national day the commemoration of their war with Russia, that would be like as if Americans celebrated the end of the civil war instead of the 4th of July", is that clarification really necessary?).
Lastly, saying that one of the three major problems of globalization is terrorism, and not even mentioning the much more relevant effects of inequality and neocolonialism, is rather outrageous.
For example, I did not know anything about the Pinochet regime in Chile, the details of the Meiji period in Japan, Finland's Winter War or post-war Australian society. Because we do a bit of a trip around the world, you don't get bored, as every country has a very unique and fascinating history, and Diamond does touch on many aspects and recounts these histories well.
On the other hand, the book relies on too much anecdotic evidence to really convince me about the broad conclusions regarding how these countries dealt well or not well with their respective crises and what that means regarding nations and crises in general and for the future world. I feel like the opinion of a country having dealt "well" or "not well" with a crisis is often based on subjective factors and personal opinions (Diamond clearly loves Finland, therefore paints its "Finlandization" rather positively, while kind of hating on Chile and blaming a democratic government for the subsequent terrible regime of Pinochet).
It is obviously quite clearly written for Americans, which is a bit annoying (e.g. "Finland has as national day the commemoration of their war with Russia, that would be like as if Americans celebrated the end of the civil war instead of the 4th of July", is that clarification really necessary?).
Lastly, saying that one of the three major problems of globalization is terrorism, and not even mentioning the much more relevant effects of inequality and neocolonialism, is rather outrageous.