Upheaval: How Nations Cope with Crisis and Change [Paperback] Diamond, Jared

Never expected to find myself so intrigued by World History, although history's always been my love, in books. Just as I sifted pages, I paused at the section of: what's the future of the modern world. And before I realized, I had goosebumps and a heat wave through my entire skin, as if I am looking at horror in the eyes. Devastated to know how we have irreversibly damaged Earth!Gripping non fiction read. Can't wait to consume every chapter. Books and content like this, make the reader very sensitive to what humanity has suffered and alert enough to minimize all future sufferings. I hope books like this are an eye opener!

Book is a good read worth the time if this is your first Jared book.4 stars because the book quality is below par because of the vendor - Re-Commerce. Other buyers have also reported similar issues

The book analyses various crises in countries in past and contemporary times, and how they overcame those crises, by drawing similarities from the psychological crisis management theory for individuals e.g. Knowing the problem, accepting responsibility, outlining it, honest self-appraisal, ego strength (national identity), flexibility, patience, important values et c.Even though it was written with the US audience in mind, nevertheless an informative read. The author has quite effectively merged his personal experiences with the countries discussed along with his academic prowess.

Escaped pandemic by whisker need update

Bad condition of delivery. Top of spine is torn and the back is folded. Product looks very old, though thats probably why it was sold at such a low price. 3 stars.

Lot of insight into problems world are facing today. With disparate examples of countries in the past , author shows way forward in critical areas,but global politics is now being hizacked by fools .

Fantastic book on nations and society's manage crisis'es and the aftermath of the fallout.. one of my favorites for 2019.

This book by Jared Diamond is better than his earlier book, "Collapse." My main critique of that book was that he focussed on what I thought were fragile lands.He has focussed on how some nations deal with crises in this book. The link to the personal crisis is, in my view, tenuous. I like the manner in which he started by listing twelve factors, then analyzing seven nations along those factors. I am unsure where Australia fits in, except that he is familiar with the country.The second part of the book, focussing on the way forward, is good, with a strong emphasis on Japan and the USA. I like the part about Germany, which is excellent.His concluding chapter and epilogue are the showpiece of the book.

This book contains Diamond’s typically very good ‘big picture’ style overview as in many of his other books, placing particular emphasis on geography and how it relates to both human societies and geopolitics, (and ultimately just plain politics). A typical example is the reason for the USA’s very fertile soils-being that successive sheets of glaciers have ground down and tilled the soil for hundreds of thousands of years, creating large expanses of fertile ground which can then feed the ~330 million+ people in the USA, and produces significant agricultural exports as well. This hasn’t happened to nearly the same extent in Europe or South America, who’s geographical shapes and also position in relation to the poles has resulted in them not being frequently covered in advancing glaciersfrom the poles. The USA also by chance has more favourable inland lakes (Great Lakes) and other waterways, enhancing early development and modes of transport.There are many other similar such good ‘geographically-based’ overviews and points, which are often simply forgotten or left out in an academic culture which often emphasises human factors over geopolitical/geographical l ones.However the section on natural resource depletion is still weak, which also seems to be very common within academia generally. I have worked in this area and read many books and studies in this field, and it still surprises me how often career academics can get this field so wrong, or just be so uninformed. It’s at least an improvement from the Club of Rome which predicted many decades ago, without any training or experience in the field of natural resources, that the world will run out of just about everything by 2000. This didn’t happen, of course, was never going to happen, and in fact we have more of many things now not less, due to better resource analysis, investigation, and definition. Academic culture has a tendency to be very poor in this area, for reasons that are a little obscure but probably partly because on the whole, academic culture is not in the ‘resource definition business’, the market generally is. When people experienced in the market point this out to academics they sometimes just ignore them largely based on perceived vested interests; now sometimes this is the case, but sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes people who have worked in the natural resource business know things that academics seem to miss, and they sometimes do ignore each other. There is indeed a history of very weak and woeful predictions when it comes to natural resource analysis and future predictions within academia. Examples of such have still slipped in here, and note also Diamond is largely a career-academic (although quite a free thinking one).For a start, on a world scale, we cannot ‘run out’ of various metals, the reason being that we only ever mine the top less than 0.1% of what is available, because the rest is currently uneconomic to extract. This is not only true for iron and aluminium, which Diamond mentions, but in fact all metals, which he doesn’t. Metals are examples of resources which are non renewable (they don’t renew in the crust at mineable concentrations through tectonic processes in any meaningful timeframe with relevance to humans) but are essentially inexhaustible. This concept gets lots on many, including many career-based academics, because their underlying assumptions have still not been properly addressed.Fossils fuels, incidentally are not quite the same, they have more limited abundance due to their not originating in the earth's crust in the first place -you need organic matter first, even though they are also modified by tectonic heat and pressure as well. They will eventually decline, but many academics still under-estimate how long this will take.The section on climate change here suffers from similar sorts of issues and assumptions. Whilst Diamond recognises that there are many non linear and variable outcomes going on with greenhouse gases, he still makes a number of questionable assumptions which many in academia also tend to do. Examples being: More CO2 in his diagram (Figure 9, p392) automatically leads to more droughts and lower food production, therefore leading to conflict. There is no qualification of this in his diagram, and this is far from the case. The diagram also, and at the same time, automatically shows more storms and floods, which is also far from the case. Storms frequency may in fact decline overall in a warmer world, largely due to the lessening of temperature differentials between regions which often create storms in the first place. (e.g. polar regions are generally warming faster the temperate regions). An example is the difference between the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific-the latter of which was named by Magellan because it was more ‘peaceful’, in large part because there is less temperature differentials between different regions in the Pacific; it has little to do with the overall temperatures of the two oceans. Referring to his diagram in general, Diamond states ‘it is certain these things will occur’. The reasoning appears solid, it’s just that the assumptions and linear maths that go into it are not. It’s the same sort of mistakes the Club of Rome made decades ago.He also misses some basic differences between rural -based countries and urban-based countries, regarding their likely future development, for similar sorts of reasons. Countries which have large populations of rural people such as China and India are like that fundamentally because of their climate, but strangely, in his discussion he largely assumes that their climate has little to do with their likely future development, comparing their development to nations which do not have rural-based economies or rural-based climates to begin with. He also assumes that overall food production will decline worldwide with climate change, but also fails to note that food production has been going up worldwide for many decades due to: better farming practises and ongoing rollouts of better technology, more CO2 in the air, and some increases in rainfall, especially in Africa. Academics tend to think that this increase in food production will sooner or later be overcome by ‘climate change’, but this is also actually far from certain.He states that corals are ‘contracting by 1-2% per year, largely due to increasing ocean acidity, again showing in the diagram and also stating they will largely be gone ‘by the end of the century’. This again is far from certain. There are serious studies on coral reefs, for exampke, which suggests this will not be the case. At least he didn’t state it will be only due to warming, because most of the Holocene was warmer and these corals didn’t go anywhere. They generally like warmer water-that’s why they grow in warm seas in the first place. (I’m glad that he has spelled it all out in the diagram on page 392, because like the Club of Rome’s failed predictions in a book in the early 1970s-which I have a copy of, it will again be very easy to see where it’s wrong and where the hidden linear-style assumptions are in future).Having said the above criticisms, there are what I would see as far better points. He sees the polarisation of politics in the USA, for example, as a move in the wrong direction, and many agree, because for one thing what goes on now often isn’t related to either reality nor reasonable, and secondly, it means democracy generally stagnates. When one or or the other side no longer compromises, things stagnate. He quite rightly doesn’t blame one side of the other, as it’s clear this affects both side of politics-the ‘unwillingness to compromise’ which has plagued US politics in recent decades, and it seems to be increasing worldwide, for obscure reasons. He speculates social media may be partly to blame, because people now more frequently choose what they want to hear, rather than hearing overviews and different sides which tend to balance each other out. In climate change and resource science in general this is also very common, as one only hears views and science which aligns with what one wants to hear, meaning over time one tends to get a one-sided picture of things without realising it.I’m sorry to say, but Diamond’s general overview of climate change and natural resource analysis also tends to suffer from academic-style cultural bias in some areas, seemingly without actually realising it.

Jared diamond is one of my favorite authors and this book is one of his best works. A must read!

フィンランドの冬戦争と継続戦争の発端と経過、戦後、ソ連のスターリンをも取り込む外交力。イギリスは宛にならず、フランスは嘘までつき、どの国もフィンランドの味方にはならない。ナチスドイツの武器で戦いはするが、フィンランドはナチス化することもなかった。14-60歳の全国民が祖国防衛戦争に立ち上がり、当時300万人の人口をもつ国で10万人の戦死者だした。J ダイアモンドは、これが北米合衆国の人口比では100万人が亡くなったことになると書いている。第一章を読み、自国を防衛するヒントにするだけでもこの著作を読む価値はある。

Jarred Diamond writes well; great reference guide. Perfect topic

I thoroughly enjoyed the case studies of how various countries dealt with crisis; Australia, Finland, Germany, Japan, Indonesia, Chile and the USA all feature here. In each case Jared Diamond looks at the crises and how each country went about facing the challenge presented to them. All of this i found fascinating and informative.The author also looks to fit each case study into a framework of 12 factors to determine how these factors affected their chances of success. This seemed a little forced, although few consistent patterns emerge. I found the last chapters, in which the author summaries the learning to be drawn, to be a little repetitive and tedious.Overall an interesting book, which could have done with a little tighter editing of the last few chapters