nouveau

after the runaway bestseller [b:Guns Germs and Steel|1842|Guns, Germs, and Steel The Fates of Human Societies|Jared Diamond|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1158959888s/1842.jpg|2138852], one hopes for another epic, history-sweeping, all-of-known-knowledge-science-and-arts-sweeping giganta-work, but instead find only limited passages in this work to have the same, "worlds on a single page" quality. GGS reformatted one's university education, so to speak; Collapse is more pure exploitation of market, Jared Diamond writing because he is a known quantity rather than epoch-making itself.

there are some excellent passages in this book detailing how the first viking settlements in greenland chose to die rather than eat fish like the despised inuit 'skraelings', and in other places, the nature of 'complex society' itself is cogently analyzed, but the ad copy for this book might be a little more aggressive than deserved, and had it not been by jared diamond, most likely, of course the book would scarcely be read.