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Very, very interesting book This is a really interesting book. Mind expanding I would say. Like his previous book Guns Germs & Steel, it will have a profound impact on the way you look at the world. Even though many misguided critics try to label Diamond as "politically correct", one of his major achievements in this book is to demolish the "politically correct" myth that environmental degradation is unique to western industrial societies, and that other primitive peoples lived in harmony with nature. To the contrary he demonstrates quite convincingly that environmental mismanagement had devastating effects on multiple societies which had never had any contact with western civilization. Like his previous book, Collapse weaves together a fantastic breadth of scientific knowledge- how agricultural practices lead to the salinization of aquifers, the effect of volcanic ash replentishing soil nutrients, cyanide leaching, the use of rat middens to study environmental history... the book is just full of fascinating scientific details, woven together into a story which, for certain chapters, reads like a historical mystery novel. His unraveling of the fates of dead civilizations has a "page turner" quality which is difficult to put down. Some of the later chapters on modern civilizations read more like a laundry list of environmental problems and are not as cohesive, that would be my one criticism and is why I didn't give it a full five stars. One intellectually challenged reviewer called this book "anti-civilization". If the incoherence and idiocy of critics is any measure of worth, this book is certainly a great one.