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Article: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.(Book review)
- Article from:
- The Geographical Review
- Article date:
- July 1, 2006
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2006 American Geographical Society. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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COLLAPSE: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. By JARED DIAMOND. xvi and 575 pp.; maps, ills., further readings, index. New York: Viking Penguin, 2005. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 0670033375; $17.00 (paper), ISBN 0143036556.
Collapse is Jared Diamond's first book since his Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997) and since he left biology to become a professor of geography. Diamond attempts to answer a question on many people's minds: What causes societies to collapse? His answer: Often, abuse of environment, specifically deforestation and soil erosion, triggers collapse. Diamond describes several pre-Columbian ...