Book - Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond

Hardback, 575 pages. Gently-used/nearly-new condition. My husband's read this copy a couple of times but the only sign of wear I can see is that the dust cover's a teeny bit scuffed from being shelved. There are also 24 pages of black-and-white plates but when I tried to upload them they got wonky on my screen so I left them off this listing. "What makes one environment more fragile than another? Why do some societies, but not others, plunge into self-destruction? Huge in scope, clear and passionate in style, Collapse is an essential book of our time, raising the urgent question: How can our world best avoid destroying itself? Through a series of fascinating historical-cultural narratives, Jared Diamond traces the fundamental pattern of catastrophe. Environmental damage, climate change, globalization, rapid population growth, and destructive political dynamics have all been factors in the demise of societies through history, but some societies found solutions and persisted. This book moves from the Polynesian cultures on Easter Island, to the flourishing American civilizations of the Anasazi and the Maya, to the doomed Viking colony on Greenland. Similar problems face us today but there is still hope, as some countries and regions try to cope in innovative ways." Jared Diamond was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his other book, "Guns, Germs, and Steel" and I'll be getting that listing up soon. Both are really great books, we're just having to downsize right now.