Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed is one of the least dry works of non-fiction I’ve ever read despite its serious subject matter. The amount of information that Diamond manages to pack into the book is incredible.

Diamond starts off Collapse with an introduction, and then goes into the eco-politics of Bitterroot Valley in Montana; he discusses a few specific environmental problems as they relate to larger environmental problems including de-forestation through logging, mining, and agriculture-related issues. If Collapse was all like the first chapter, I wouldn’t recommend it so highly, so it’s important to continue reading.

As Collapse progresses, Diamond examines the causes for population loss in a few small societies. His basic premise is that as societies grow more quickly, they tap into more of their resources. He believes the rapid growth, combined with natural environmental causes that are unavoidable, has directly contributed and possibly caused the demise of several small societies (or civilizations depending on how you want to label them.) Fortunately, Diamond goes beyond the causes for a society’s collapse and discusses the building up of societies and the remnants that are left from previous societies. One of the most interesting examples he provides is of the statues left at Easter Island which some believe were left by aliens. (I’m not joking.) He also discusses incidents of cannibalism and other interesting factors related to the collapse of small societies; these details not only make for interesting reading, they can give you fodder for discussion for days on end.

Despite the inclusion of juicier tidbits about cannibals and alien theories, Collapse stays on target through the book as a serious discussion about what contributes the rise and fall of societies; the later chapters focus on larger civilizations where Diamond poses more hypothesis about why the larger societies or civilizations vanished over the years. One of the very last chapters looks into environmental problems that will eventually face Australia over time; as I was reading that particular chapter, Queensland was flooding, so it appears that Diamond may not be all that off in his predictions.

Collapse has an enormous amount of information and it’s difficult to choose what’s most important from the text. De-forestation and over-population are constant themes throughout the book and are definitely more emphasized than the more interesting tidbits scattered through the book about cannibalism and the like. Diamond also examines the difficult subject of genocide and ethnic cleansing and the possibility that Malthusian principles of over-population may play a role in certain situations.

Although Collapse will definitely be available at your local library, I strongly recommend buying a copy because you will probably want to have the book on hand as a reference or to read again because of the sheer amount of factual information and theories in the book. If you read Guns, Germs, and Steel, but didn't like it, you might still like Collapse.