Book review thread - non-fiction

[wazzickle]

Thinking it would be a good idea for me to review some of the books that I read, of which the non-fiction usually come under the category of science, anthropology or history, which I figure people here might be interested in.

Please feel free to contribute your own reviews or comments - reviews of non-fiction books of any genre are entirely welcome in this thread!

Collapse - Jared Diamond - (Anthropology, 2005)

His previous book that I read - Guns, Germs and Steel (1997) - is a classic in the world of anthropology. The central question driving his investigation was 'given that agriculture arose independently in both the middle east and the Americas, why was it Europe that invaded the Americas, and consequently dominated world politics, economic and culture for most of the time since, rather than the other way round?' - the (somewhat oversimplified, of course) conclusions being that the east-west axis of the Eurasian land mass allowed crops to spread in relatively similar conditions, rather than the north-south axis of the American land mass, leading to higher population density and more resistance to nastier bugs; horses being native to Eurasia rather than the Americas helped drive agriculture and industry, as well as adding military power; and the discovery of gunpowder, all factors that contributed to the decimation of thousands of Incan soldiers by only 168 Spanish men in 1532, and the eventual collapse of the Incan empire.

Collapse employs a similar range of scientific methods and similarly incredible rigour to analyse in-depth all of the factors present in those societies that have died out - for example, the natives of Easter Island, leaving their famous Moai statues, the Greenland Norse, and a few others - as well as in those societies that could have done, but didn't (e.g. Icelanders) and attempts to tease out the relative importance of each. Where we have written records, for example, with the Greenland Norse, we can see that they had contact with the local Inuit tribes, but had the misfortune of arriving at a time of near-optimal conditions for growing the crops they were used to growing at home and maintaining some of their prestige livestock (that were utterly unsuitable in the long-term to the local ecosystem) and assuming that these conditions would continue - but climates change naturally. Instead of making friends with the Inuit and copying their highly-advanced boat-building techniques and learning to fish and hunt whales, they stuck to their European and Christian values, and would even kill the Inuit on sight a lot of the time rather than trade with them. When temperatures dropped, and the soil, continually eroding due to deforestation, became less and less suitable for growing crops, they continued to choose to be wedded to their parent culture rather than adapt, and they all died out.

A similar story is told with the Easter Islanders, from whom there are no written records, but a variety of ingenious scientific and historical techniques can with remarkable accuracy lead to conclusions about the nature of their statues, and the original conditions when the island was first colonized. The recurring question that he asks, and is asked by students, is this: 'What must that man have been thinking, when he chopped down the very last tree on Easter Island?' There would have been such a man, and deforestation was the key factor in their demise. Wouldn't they have known the effects of their actions? Why did they do it, when they could maintain a perfectly-reasonable quality of life while maintaining or even regenerating the level of wood growing on the island?

He gives examples of cultures that have managed to live in somewhat balance with their surroundings, and how and why - the feudal Japanese, medieval Germans, and the particularly interesting case study of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, together making the island of Hispaniola, both appallingly-poor and with similar and highly intermingled histories and ecologies, but with very different results in today's reckoning, allowing the strength of various factors to be measured with reasonable degrees of certainty.

He also, heartbreakingly, looks at the eventual results of population pressure, a result of Malthus theory - the conflict between linearly-increasing production of food and exponential expansion of population. The example that sticks out is the Rwandan genocides, which while on the surface were a product of politicians setting family members against each other in an utterly inhumane attempt to consolidate power (another theme common to societies that kill themselves), was more driven by incredible levels of overpopulation and disastrous levels of agricultural efficiency. Tutsis and Hutus killed each other plenty, but both the genetic and cultural lines that divided them weren't actually that strong, and Tutsis killed Tutsis and Hutus killed Hutus aplenty, more than anything else because they didn't have enough food.

[wazzickle]

On his historical and geographical tour, he takes in the vast levels of damage China is currently doing and the implications of it’s population explosion and the rising levels of middle classes all over the world. He goes into the detail of Australia’s disastrous history of ecological interventions and terrible decisions, and predicts that Australia’s current living standard and population size is completely unsustainable, leading to complete ecological and vast population collapse for most of it’s urban population centers within twenty or thirty years.

The last section looks at practical lessons for us today. Would future societies look at our world and make similar judgments as we’ve done looking at the Greenland Norse, the Easter Islanders, or Rwandans? What factors are present in those societies who have managed to maintain balance with their ecosystems? We can vote, and we can change our own behaviour, but we are somewhat limited in our individual power – he goes into some detail about the best way to wield that power, and what obstacles lay in our way. In some industries, such as fisheries and logging, the supply chains from producers to end-user are simple and clear, and the consumer can exert pressure easily by voting with their wallet, putting pressure on companies to at least try to clean up their act, but when they become more complex, it becomes difficult to know how to ‘shop responsibly’. He gives his best opinions on ways to interact with big businesses and politicians to try to do the best possible good.

Jared Diamond not only does an incredible job of relaying the most relevant data and packaging it up in a way that lets the layman see what is and isn’t important in the world of ecological collapse, but he does so without ever being explicit about his own opinions. Where ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’ has no explicit messages about politics or environmentalism, though, it’s almost impossible to read ‘Collapse’ without your heart breaking at the prospects ahead of us. Within the first and last few chapters, we start to get a real take on how this has affected him personally, though, and I came away with a dual sense of empowerment at the range of facts now at my disposal, and sadness at what we and our forebears have unwittingly done to future generations.

As a side note, reading up on him online has shocked me. People have accused him, apparently, of being an apologist for capitalist, all the way through to having white saviour complex. These criticisms are incredible to me. I can only imagine that people have seen the subject matter and have decided ahead of time either or both what he’s going to say, or how they’re going to feel in reaction to it. These criticisms, in my view, say far more about the critics than Jared Diamond or his work. He comes across as utterly rigorous and takes great pains not to insert his own views, letting the readers come to their own conclusions. I see that he has written a book about sex, and why humans enjoy it, and I can’t wait to read it.

9.5/10

P.S. One of the ways in which I believe I can do good is to spread the word, and in that vein, I have already mailed copies of this book to two friends; if you have an interest, please PM me, and I will have a copy mailed to you too (limited supplies tho obv)