Collapse

Jared Diamond's follow-up to Guns, Germs, and Steel turns from how civilizations rose to why some of them collapsed. He defines collapse as a drastic, lasting fall in population or in political, economic and social complexity across a wide area, and compares past and present societies to test what drives it. Five factors recur: environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, the loss of key trading partners and how a society responds to those pressures. The case studies range from the Maya and the Anasazi to Easter Island and the Norse colony on Greenland, and Diamond also looks at Rwanda, Haiti, China, Australia and Montana. The British edition carries the subtitle How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive.

Bill Gates called it an interesting follow-up to Guns, Germs, and Steel that looks at how some of history's greatest civilizations fell.