No beating about the bush

摘要

Jared diamond has made a name for himself explaining why some societies do well and others do not. In "Guns, Germs and Steel", his 1997 bestseller, he brushed aside the arrogant view that ascribed Europe's dominance to human biology, stressing instead the continent's environmental advantages, notably its native wheat and barley and its easily domesticated animals. He followed this up eight years later with "Collapse", another exhaustive study, this time about how certain societies caused their own demise by ruining the environs that sustained them. Read together, these are civilisation-scale books about survival.