"; if(is_file("header.php")) include "header.php"; else include "../header.php"; ?>

A triumph of mass marketing I'm an old fan of Diamond, but with each book I like him less. "Collapse" isn't really about science or ecology or the lessons of history, but how to sell books. Take a no-argument topic (People can destroy their environment,) add urgency (This is happening to us!)get some research assistants to dig up what interesting facts they can (even if they get them wrong,) and get a saleable author to provide some paragraph links and put his name to it, and everyone makes a buck (except the consumer.) You can keep publishing costs down by eliminating editors and proofreaders, e.g.: "...for the benefit of the corpses of the souls" instead of "the souls of the corpses." (p.237) There are plenty of astonishing facts too: We learn that the Norse ships took "a week or more" to cover the 2000-plus sailing miles from Norway to Greenland (Given the means of navigation and the weather in those latitutes, truth is, six weeks would have been a quick trip.) But then time ran backward in those days, because, according to Diamond, Erik the Red assumed that artifacts he found on his first visit to Greenland were left by the Vinland Skraelings. (Trouble is, the discovery of Vinland came 20 years after the discovery of Greenland, so at the time Erik knew nothing of either the land or the people his son Leif later came upon.) Virtually all of the information on Norse settlements and culture is lifted from a single source, The Vikings, The North Atlantic Saga, by Fitzshugh and Ward eds., published by the Smithsonian in conjunction with its recent touring exhibition. There's no reason to believe Diamond actually read any of the other books in his bibliography, or he'd realize much of the scholarship, such as the work done by Jesse Byock, actually contradicts his conclusions. Obviously Diamond knows better, but the book was obviously slapped together fast and marketed. Read the book and enjoy it, but don't trust a single fact in it. Double check everything.