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Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Paperback (US Edition) ISBN: 9780143036555
Paperback (UK Edition) ISBN: 9780140279511
Author(s): Jared Diamond Publisher:Penguin (US), Faber & Faber (UK)

BOOK DESCRIPTION:
From groundbreaking writer and thinker, Jared Diamond comes an epic, visionary new book on the mysterious collapse of past civilizations — and what this means for our future. Why do some societies flourish, while others founder? What happened to the people who made the forlorn long-abandoned statues of Easter Island or to the architects of the crumbling Maya pyramids? Will we go the same way, our skyscrapers one day standing derelict and overgrown like the temples at Angkor Wat? Bringing together new evidence from a startling range of sources and piecing together the myriad influences, from climate to culture, that make societies self-destruct, Collapse also shows how unlike our ancestors we can benefit from our knowledge of the past and learn to be survivors.

See on Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.

REVIEW:
"...the fact that one of the world's most original thinkers has chosen to pen this mammoth work when his career is at his apogee is itself a persuasive argument that Collapse must be taken seriously. It is probably the most important book you will ever read." ...Tim Flannery, Science
 

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Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

Hardback (US Edition) ISBN: 9780393061314

Paperback (US Edition) ISBN: 9780393317558
Paperback (UK Edition) ISBN: 9780099302780
Author(s): Jared Diamond Publisher:WW Norton & Co (US), Vintage (UK)

BOOK DESCRIPTION:
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize. In this "artful, informative, and delightful" (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. Societies that had had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed religion — as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war — and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history. Jared Diamond's book is winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, the Rhone-Poulenc Prize, and the Commonwealth Club of California's Gold Medal.

See on Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.

REVIEW:
"Yet despite its inevitable minor flaws, this book remains a very impressive achievement of imagination and exposition, which tells us much about the interaction between 'civilised' minds and 'primitive' peoples at the end of the second millennium of the Christian era. To end, as we began, with a nineteenth-century perspective on such matters:" ...Tom Tomlinson (University of Strathclyde) Reviews in History [LINK to full Review]
 

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The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal

ISBN: 9780060845506
Author(s): Jared Diamond, Publisher: Harper Perennial

BOOK DESCRIPTION:
The Development of an Extraordinary Species We human beings share 98 percent of our genes with chimpanzees. Yet humans are the dominant species on the planet — having founded civilizations and religions, developed intricate and diverse forms of communication, learned science, built cities, and created breathtaking works of art — while chimps remain animals concerned primarily with the basic necessities of survival. What is it about that two percent difference in DNA that has created such a divergence between evolutionary cousins? In this fascinating, provocative, passionate, funny, endlessly entertaining work, renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning author and scientist Jared Diamond explores how the extraordinary human animal, in a remarkably short time, developed the capacity to rule the world . . . and the means to irrevocably destroy it.