Collapse

Diamond explores the environmental factors, climate change, the population explosion, and political discord that result in the collapse of civilization in his latest book. Environmental damage, climate change, globalization, rapid population growth, and unwise political choices were all factors in the demise of societies around the world, but some found solutions and persisted. As in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel , Diamond traces a fundamental pattern of catastrophe and weaves an all-encompassing global thesis through a series of fascinating historical-cultural narratives. Collapse moves from the Polynesian cultures on Easter Island to the flourishing American civilizations of the Anasazi and the Maya and finally to the doomed Viking colony on Greenland. "