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A review by korine
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond
2.0
The premise is interesting and important. What factors contributed to the collapse of past societies that could contribute to similar collapses today? What factors led to success in past societies that we might incorporate today?
The information is valuable but it gets lost in the rambling excess of words in this book. It seriously doesn't need to be this long... It seemed as though examples that didn't fit the narrative were excluded. Others have analyzed the potential for some of the language to qualify as environmental determinism so I'll skip that here, but Diamond does repeatedly argue that he's not being an environmental determinist in his writings. I'm not entirely convinced...
A number of times I cringed as I was reading due to borderline or obvious xenophobic language, particularly in relation to transnational immigration. Additionally, Diamond discusses problems in the Global South (referred to as "Third World" countries) without placing enough emphasis on the ravages of colonialism. (The book was published in 2005, but First World and Third World had already fallen out of use by then - more cringe-worthy terms) As an example, Diamond writes, "Conversely, people in the Third World can now, intentionally or unintentionally, send us their own bad things: their diseases like AIDS, SARS, cholera, and West Nile fever..." Us vs Them?? And what about the "blame" of wealthy transnational corporations who contribute to disease emergence through resource extraction in other countries, just as one example? Scholars of terrorism note the role of past destabilizing policies of the West that contributed to recent events but instead destabilization and events are blamed on overpopulation and other internal causes. This book had so much potential but made me cringe in its treatment of people in less wealthy nations.
The information is valuable but it gets lost in the rambling excess of words in this book. It seriously doesn't need to be this long... It seemed as though examples that didn't fit the narrative were excluded. Others have analyzed the potential for some of the language to qualify as environmental determinism so I'll skip that here, but Diamond does repeatedly argue that he's not being an environmental determinist in his writings. I'm not entirely convinced...
A number of times I cringed as I was reading due to borderline or obvious xenophobic language, particularly in relation to transnational immigration. Additionally, Diamond discusses problems in the Global South (referred to as "Third World" countries) without placing enough emphasis on the ravages of colonialism. (The book was published in 2005, but First World and Third World had already fallen out of use by then - more cringe-worthy terms) As an example, Diamond writes, "Conversely, people in the Third World can now, intentionally or unintentionally, send us their own bad things: their diseases like AIDS, SARS, cholera, and West Nile fever..." Us vs Them?? And what about the "blame" of wealthy transnational corporations who contribute to disease emergence through resource extraction in other countries, just as one example? Scholars of terrorism note the role of past destabilizing policies of the West that contributed to recent events but instead destabilization and events are blamed on overpopulation and other internal causes. This book had so much potential but made me cringe in its treatment of people in less wealthy nations.