Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail Or Succeed | Jared Diamond

What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates?

The Pulitzer Prize-winner traces the fundamental patterns of social catastrophe and physical collapse to a combination of environmental degradation, resource depletion, draughts, political upheaval, economic disaster, and war.

Diamond employs the comparison method to test his hypotheses about the history of civilization, comparing different collapses at different times in different places around the world.