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This is NOT of the same caliber as Guns, Germs, and Steel When I saw this book at my local bookstore for 30% off, I snatched it up and expected to be drawn into another fascinating historical narrative by Jared Diamond with important things to say about today's world. This didn't happen to the extent I expected. After finishing the book (which, by the way, with its 500+ pages is not a task for the feeble-hearted), I'm fairly certain that Diamond is spending too much time fly fishing in Montana, bird watching in Papua New Guinea and being held up in traffic in LA and not enough time tying up all the loose ends he has left in this novel as well as eliminating about 1/3 of the text without hurting his premise. A writing style that introduces a subject by telling the reader what you're going to write, then presenting it in great detail followed by a summary that reiterates what has just been written is perfect for a PowerPoint presentation in the corporate boardroom. However, in Collapse, this is repeated chapter after chapter and the chapters themselves appear to be originally written as separate self-contained essays. The overall effect is somewhat akin to being bludgeoned to death with the same information and conclusions over and over! In the first chapter, Diamond informs us that he began the book with the "naive" expectation that it would just be about environmental damage but eventually resorted to a five-point framework to explain the collapse of societies where an environmental component was involved (p. 11). The five points are: (1) environmental damage, (2) climate change, (3) hostile neighbors, (4) friendly trade partners, and (5) the society's response to their environmental problems. Diamond remains faithful to this five-point structure throughout the book, but weakens his case by his choice of examples. Most are very isolated societies shrouded in mystery at the end of a narrow life-line where common sense dictates that long-term survival would be tenuous. The "mystery" involved in many of these collapses gives Diamond the license to expose us to really "cool" examples of geological detective work involving the study of tree rings, sedimentary cores and (my favorite) rat middens. This is amazing stuff, but hardly something to create a sense of urgency about the consequences of environmental damage in the present world. Diamond would have been better served to show examples of why environmental devastation didn't crash some great civilizations in the past as well as giving us more concrete examples of how true "civilizations" went down the tubes due to destruction of the environment. His treatise on the Mayan civilization is the closest he gets to this. In my opinion, this is the weakest link in his otherwise persuasive argument. In the final chapter, Diamond uses the Dutch word for land reclaimed from the sea, "polder", to advance his premises that the world is one big polder today, the environmental consequences of anyone region are truly global, and we all need to look after the environment together if we are to prosper. This seems very reasonable and is nothing new, but is a bit at odds with the premises he has advanced throughout the rest of the book which predicated collapse in situations of isolation or contact with only a limited number of other societies. Throughout the book, Diamond does a nice job of personalizing many of his examples. The effect on me has been that I've been noticing subtle environmental issues around me. These include erosion of horse trails at a dude ranch in the Texas hill country when the trail does not follow the contour of the land and residential construction sites in Houston clear-cut before the building begins which eventually results in the previous piney woods being replaced with an urban forest of live oaks and other tree species. A greater awareness of local environmental impacts might be one of the most positive potential results of reading this book. Because reading it is such a long and tedious journey, I doubt that too many will persevere to the end.