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kieranhealy 's review for:
Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis
by Jared Diamond
This book is: a comparative, narrative, exploratory study of crisis and selective change operating over many decades in seven modern nations, of all of which I have much personal experience, and viewed from the perspective of selective change in personal crises. Those nations are Finland, Japan, Chile, Indonesia, Germany, Australia, and the United States.
-Jared Diamond, Upheaval
Jared Diamond is a master of comparative study, seemingly able to take a broadly complex topic and distill it down into a digestible format, using comparative examples to support his points. In the case of Upheaval, Diamond attempts to extrapolate personal psychological response to crisis into a nation at large, using countries he is most familiar with. He freely admits the limitations of his approach, as well as acknowledging that it was the fallback to his original approach: a qualitative analysis using data, facts and large-scale statistics. As such, while this book makes many interesting points, and provides some great food for thought, it ultimately is just an anecdotal idea generator. Easily dismissed by naysayers and Diamond-haters, with heavy lifting to be done by someone else at some future date.
Diamond breaks the “predictors for successful outcome” down to 12 essential points:
1. National consensus that one's nation is in crisis
2. Acceptance of national responsibility to do
something
3. Building a fence, to delineate the national problems needing to be solved
4. Getting material and financial help from other
nations
5. Using other nations as models of how to solve the
problems
6. National identity
7. Honest national self-appraisal
8. Historical experience of previous national crises
9. Dealing with national failure
10. Situation-specific national flexibility
11. National core values
12. Freedom from geopolitical constraints
A nation need not all predictors, but the more the better. He then goes through every nation, picking a particular crisis and how that nation ignored/failed to see the crisis coming or were shocked by a sudden crisis, and their subsequent responses.
I did find the book interesting, and enlightening in some arguments. In particular Finland’s diplomatic and military response to the Russian invasion of 1939 (a lesson Ukraine is probably looking to currently, one hopes), and the chilling similarities between Chile’s coup and subsequent terror and my own United States current political climate and economic disparity.
I would recommend this book to anyone for an interesting, thought provoking read, even if ultimately it falls a bit short of it’s own intended goals. Those with socialist or anti-capitalism sentiments will certainly hate it. I did not.
-Jared Diamond, Upheaval
Jared Diamond is a master of comparative study, seemingly able to take a broadly complex topic and distill it down into a digestible format, using comparative examples to support his points. In the case of Upheaval, Diamond attempts to extrapolate personal psychological response to crisis into a nation at large, using countries he is most familiar with. He freely admits the limitations of his approach, as well as acknowledging that it was the fallback to his original approach: a qualitative analysis using data, facts and large-scale statistics. As such, while this book makes many interesting points, and provides some great food for thought, it ultimately is just an anecdotal idea generator. Easily dismissed by naysayers and Diamond-haters, with heavy lifting to be done by someone else at some future date.
Diamond breaks the “predictors for successful outcome” down to 12 essential points:
1. National consensus that one's nation is in crisis
2. Acceptance of national responsibility to do
something
3. Building a fence, to delineate the national problems needing to be solved
4. Getting material and financial help from other
nations
5. Using other nations as models of how to solve the
problems
6. National identity
7. Honest national self-appraisal
8. Historical experience of previous national crises
9. Dealing with national failure
10. Situation-specific national flexibility
11. National core values
12. Freedom from geopolitical constraints
A nation need not all predictors, but the more the better. He then goes through every nation, picking a particular crisis and how that nation ignored/failed to see the crisis coming or were shocked by a sudden crisis, and their subsequent responses.
I did find the book interesting, and enlightening in some arguments. In particular Finland’s diplomatic and military response to the Russian invasion of 1939 (a lesson Ukraine is probably looking to currently, one hopes), and the chilling similarities between Chile’s coup and subsequent terror and my own United States current political climate and economic disparity.
I would recommend this book to anyone for an interesting, thought provoking read, even if ultimately it falls a bit short of it’s own intended goals. Those with socialist or anti-capitalism sentiments will certainly hate it. I did not.