![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Collapse; spring?
Jan. 26th, 2006 07:45 amBook read: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail, Jared Diamond.
I got bogged down among the Norse last year, but have made it through the second half of the book since Jan. 1 While I am, in principle, in favor of the kind of sweeping synthesis Diamond engages in (see also: Guns, Germs and Steel), in practice it tends to drive me a bit bonkers, especially when I have some professional knowledge of things under discussion, and can see where inconvenient details are being fudged or ignored in favor of the sweeping hypothesis. This was more of a problem with Guns, Germs, and Steel for me, maybe partly because of my subject specialty when I was an archaeologist, and also partly because that book was not as tightly edited as this one. Collapse had boggy parts and redundancies, but not nearly as many as Guns, Germs. Many of the case studies were tight and (as far as I knew about them already, and I had a passing familarity with Easter Island, the Maya, the Anasazi, and the Norse in particular) accurate. The Norse went on too long, IMO - the length was repetitive. The only section I thought was not successful was the 4th, the sort of summary and "what does all this mean" section, and in particular the last chapter. There Diamond refuted in a couple of paragraphs each a number of straw-man style objections to his thesis - never a particularly strong way to write, and especially not a strong way to finish an otherwise interesting book. The last chapter was general and more political than the rest, and one of the strongest parts of the book was the specificity of both the case studies and Diamond's own acedotal stories of change in areas he's visited.
In spring news, my neighbors have snowdrops in bloom this morning. I have shoots of daffodils, bluebells, and starflower, as well as what I think is one of my Turkish tulips. It's Jan. 26. It's been a unusually warm winter, even for here. I would say we've hit 60 degrees on at least half the days in January so far.
I got bogged down among the Norse last year, but have made it through the second half of the book since Jan. 1 While I am, in principle, in favor of the kind of sweeping synthesis Diamond engages in (see also: Guns, Germs and Steel), in practice it tends to drive me a bit bonkers, especially when I have some professional knowledge of things under discussion, and can see where inconvenient details are being fudged or ignored in favor of the sweeping hypothesis. This was more of a problem with Guns, Germs, and Steel for me, maybe partly because of my subject specialty when I was an archaeologist, and also partly because that book was not as tightly edited as this one. Collapse had boggy parts and redundancies, but not nearly as many as Guns, Germs. Many of the case studies were tight and (as far as I knew about them already, and I had a passing familarity with Easter Island, the Maya, the Anasazi, and the Norse in particular) accurate. The Norse went on too long, IMO - the length was repetitive. The only section I thought was not successful was the 4th, the sort of summary and "what does all this mean" section, and in particular the last chapter. There Diamond refuted in a couple of paragraphs each a number of straw-man style objections to his thesis - never a particularly strong way to write, and especially not a strong way to finish an otherwise interesting book. The last chapter was general and more political than the rest, and one of the strongest parts of the book was the specificity of both the case studies and Diamond's own acedotal stories of change in areas he's visited.
In spring news, my neighbors have snowdrops in bloom this morning. I have shoots of daffodils, bluebells, and starflower, as well as what I think is one of my Turkish tulips. It's Jan. 26. It's been a unusually warm winter, even for here. I would say we've hit 60 degrees on at least half the days in January so far.