What is wrong with Jared Diamond's Collapse?

by moaina

I'm couple hundred pages into the book and am really enjoying it however I just discovered he isn't the most loved writer. Is it worth it continuing the book?

tim_mcdaniel

Many previous discussions of Jared Diamond are archived, so you can't vote or add followup questions there. The mods don't want to discourage more questions and discussion, so by all means add it here if anything occurs to you.

One previous discussion here is How historically accurate is Jared Diamonds 'Collapse' and what do historians think of it?. But I wish there were more details, and a lot is about Diamond's approach in general rather than Collapse specifically.

/u/Smellslikesnow pointed to Wade Davis' take, at http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jan/09/history-society . "As Davis' article argues, Diamond's understanding of the world is based in the colonial anthropology of the 19th century: Diamond's popular oeuvre perpetuates anachronistic ideals and beliefs. Diamond's an engaging, entertaining writer, no doubt. He's not an original thinker, unfortunately. He's conventional, quaint, and, frequently, quite backwards; sometimes dangerously so." But the article is about Diamond himself, and mostly about Guns, Germs, and Steel and The World Until Yesterday, with only one paragraph even mentioning Collapse.

/u/terminuspostquem, here, has pointers to reviews, and pointers to arrays of reviews. Again, though, most appear to be about Diamond's works in general.

There's an FAQ section Historians' views of Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel": same song.

asdjk482

There's been a very active and many-sided debate over pretty much every aspect of Diamond's account of Easter Island and the Rapa Nui, which you can get a basic run-down of here.