If you're interested the phenomena of "collapse", I would recommend the following two titles as an alternative to Jared Diamond:

Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire edited by Patricia McAnany and Norman Yoffee

Understanding Collapse: Ancient History and Modern Myths by Guy Middleton

The first book is explicitly a counterargument to Diamond's Collapse, and is also written for a general audience. The second is a little bit more academic but well worth the read for a thorough comparative treatment of what a "collapse" really is. Despite the increased depth I found it quite readable and it's not too much of a tome at 350ish pages.

One great place to start is "Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest" by Matthew Restall. As the title suggests, he takes on some of those big stories that US Americans have largely internalized about why and how colonization happened. Each chapter is about different themes like disease, militaries, population, translation, etc. Basically, he argues against Diamond and others who have told an oversimplified story that "colonizers just had a more advanced society and military so they won." The book is by an academic historian, but I would say it reads more like "pop history" because of the organization of the book. You can read each chapter by itself and you don't have to have any prior knowledge to get the point.

On the other end of the spectrum, I think you would enjoy Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything." He is a fiction writer and comedian, so certainly not an academic historian, but his book is humorous and really helped me understand natural history in a way that I had never understood before. The book summarizes intellectual history and works through how humans figured out what the universe was made of: plate tectonics, heliocentrism, protons and quarks, germ theory, etc. It is written by a very established author (even if not academic) that I found very readable and well-researched. Each page had me understanding the world in a way that I had not before.

Both of these books are not so much about 'how do we build better societies' because that is a question more for politicians and sociologists than historians. However, I think both books get at those questions from interesting angles and they are very engaging in their own right. Happy reading!

Fernand Braudel’s “The Mediterranean” and “A History of Civilizations” are big reads but both very good. In “the Mediterranean” he goes into great detail about how and why civilizations developed and how geography and the environment effect the growth of civilizations, pointing out how these growing or declining societies lived in relation to the sea and the land over time

Whenever people first find out that academics don't like Jared Diamond, Yuval Harari, or any other non-specialist who decided for themselves that writing anthropology/history is easy, actually, their first response is usually:

Well, what should I read instead?

It's a reasonable question. After all, if Diamond has given the wrong answers, surely someone has given the right ones, if not the slight-less-wrong ones.

And yet, for as long as this sub's been around, we've rarely been able to provide a solid, definite response.

The books you've been recommended so far together do a great job of explaining why that is. Restall's Seven Myths shows Diamond's version of history to be wildly false, despite its "truthiness" to lay readers. One might add to that the edited volume Beyond Germs to dissect the myth that novel germs and unprepared immune systems are mostly to blame for demographic decline. It's a bit more academic but rarely gets too detailed for a casual reader; the authors seem well aware they are writing for many beyond their fields. Most of it is available online.

1491 and The Dawn of Everything are both excellent surveys of "what exactly have anthropologists and archaeologists been up to in the past 40 years?"

Collapse has the dubious honor of two full books written in response to it. Both are great.

We could go on and on, and there's the AskHistorians Booklist for that, though it's unlikely you'll find much in there that gets at this:

I'm especially interested in books like Collapse, Upheaval, and The World Until Yesterday, which cover topics related to the characteristics that make societies resilient and successful

Often when people are looking for history books, they are looking for reading that will help them understand The Way The World Works. Smart people like yourself have Big Questions because the world is enormous and confusing, and maybe, just maybe, historians and anthropologists have stared at other people long enough to be able to offer some insight into all this Humanity. We know that we live in dynamic Societies, societies which evolve, develop, emerge, collapse, succeed, and fail. There's patterns there somewhere but still it's all so messy.

All too often when confronted with this, we begin posing questions not in search of an answer, but in expectation of one. We know that geography affects societies, and so we look for the ways it has. Never mind that there's a difference between "geography demonstrably impacts human societies" and "geography impacts human societies in ways that we can isolate, identify, explain, and predict." We know that Rome and the USSR collapsed, so we look for how that happened. Never mind that the very idea of "collapse" is generally not historically sound.

And then along comes Diamond (or the others), and they have Answers. These answers make the things you know make sense, and therefore they must have value.

At no point in this process have we allowed ourselves to dissect our initial assumptions. This is what happens when we seek out history as a tool to make sense of the world: we start with some need, and we fill in details and such as necessary to fill that need. It's what this fantastic review of Diamond's Upheaval calls The Framework, the ultimate answer to our question that structures our knowledge, as if we were approaching research like a student filling in a guided reading worksheet.

As I've discussed here, academics and the public often talk past each other when evaluating a book. Academic history is good if it is comprehensive, factually accurate, engages well with other literature, develops its arguments, or draws insightful conclusions. Popular history is good if it fills in perceived gaps in a reader's knowledge, makes sense of the things they do, and meshes well with personal experience and perspectives. This is a difficult thing to overcome, because it requires tearing up what you know and building something entirely new. Diamond and his ilk are cathartic; they don't question what you know, and they treat the gaps as what you know as legitimate lines of inquiry and discovery, not things that that actual scholars have been working on for decades. While the line between academic and popular history isn't sharp (/u/consistencyisalliask and /u/restricteddata), the opposite ends of the spectrum are radically different in how they present their own authority and comprehensiveness, as expanded on here by /u/Trevor_Culley.

So as you look for more things to read, I would encourage you to be honest about what you are looking for, what type of questions you're interested in, and the extent to which those questions might be based in faulty preconceptions.

For similar sweep and verve, I recommend everything by Charles C. Mann. His book 1491 is a wonderful and reasonably current synopsis of things most people don't know about the ancient Americas. 1493 and The Wizard and the Prophet are both wonderful too.

Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything is excellent as a demolition of popular myths about the past and about "small-scale" societies.

David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years is very good, although I like the first half much more than the second half.

A few others:

Four Lost Cities by Annalee Newitz is great.

Stephen Mithen and Brian Fagan are both archaeologists who have written big-picture books for laymen. I especially like Mithen's After the Ice, which is a detailed and wonderfully vivid "travelogue" through prehistory from the end of the Ice Age through the development of agriculture all over the world.

Against the Grain by James C Scott (focused on the ancient Near East, less a history than a meta-narrative but worthwhile)

Europe and the People Without History by Eric Wolf (an oldie but goodie)

The WEIRDest People in the World by Joseph Henrich (about how the West is psychologically peculiar and how it got that way, written by a serious researcher with one foot in anthropology and the other in psychology)

A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived by Adam Rutherford (a good overview of genetics and genomics. I much prefer it to competing titles)

I instantly thought of authors that I see touted here whose work I personally cannot stand, and then couldn't come up with much to suggest that is popular from my own field. Argh. I think that anyone who writes history not for academics will be picked apart by academics because we're trained to look at every detail, from every angle, and through specific scholarly lenses. This is exactly the kind of thing that makes our writing dry and inaccessible to non-scholarly audiences (hemming, hawing, and jargon, oh my!), but take that out and there will always be an academic saying well, actually....

However, there are virtually no academic works we all agree are great, either, so here's the reason I'm bringing this up; read what seems compelling to you, based on recs or not, but know that no single person is the sole authority on any topic, ever. If an author tells a story or makes a claim you find especially sensational, memorable, etc, see if you can find another author who reports the same story, and see if they retell or dissect it differently. It's possible the story has been sensationalized, simplified, embroidered to suit a purpose (like selling books!) - but it's also possible that it hasn't been (truth is stranger than fiction, after all)! But this is a huge part of what we do as academics - evaluate various viewpoints. So if you want to read whichever popular history book, do it, but do it with a grain or three of salt (and maybe the AskHistorians FAQ, if relevant), and look for other takes on what they say before you take them at face value.

Is Mary Beard OK? I’m totally out of academia but I have enjoyed her books, which are very accessible for lay readers and also fun to read.

Follow up question: As I understand it, the criticism of Jared Diamond is that there are many minor points he got wrong in guns germs and steel and that the major flaw seems to be that we can’t prove geopolitics influence because it’s all hindsight and nothing to compare it to. But is the issue that we can’t prove geopolitics or is it that we can actually disprove his take on it?

I would check out Questioning Collapse. It's a collection of essays, edited by Norman Yoffee and Patricia A. McAnany. If there's an essay in it you particularly like you can see what else the author has written. McAnany's has a couple books on the Maya for instance that I thought were really approachable.

In regards to Upheaval, there was a decent post about it on /r/badhistory with a couple sources. https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/brhwpu/upheaval_jared_diamond_vs_finland/

Would like to second "Dawn of Everything" by Graeber and Wengrow. Easy read and, what makes it stand out in my mind, a very clear historiography. Lots of info on previous scholarship and what's been done thats helpful/not helpful.

Also academic enough that Wengrow is presenting next week at Harvard, link is to the livestream page if anyone wants to tune in!

Edit: included the right, alive presenter...

I would recommend The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt by Toby Wilkinson. It indirectly covers issues such as reslience and collapse, and these are clearly illustrated as he describes how the numerous pharaonic dynasties rose to prominence before falling back, sometimes into obscurity. Issues such as why the sanctity of tombs became to be less revered, the tricky subject of handling succession, and dealing with migration are just some of the relevant topics that feature in various scenarios throughout Ancient Egyptian history.

Hey OP, you should ask this on r/AskAnthropology too

If you’re interested in what popular press books like GJS and Sapiens (and because someone mentioned it, Mann’s 1491 and 1493) took influence from, I’d recommend checking out the works of the historian Alfred Crosby. The aforementioned texts are very much modeled around his two most famous works The Colombian Exchange and Ecological Imperialism. Unlike Diamond, Crosby mostly remained in the world of professional historians and academia, yet his influence cannot be overstated. While many historians have critiqued his work on similar grounds (biological determinism), he is still widely respected as a key figure in environmental history. Other recommendations I have are Immanuel Wallerstein’s multi volume series The Modern World System and Toby Green’s A Fistfull of Shells-both well respected academic works. (worth noting that these texts explore the emergence of the modern world, i.e. 15th century to the 19th and 20th. So while they have that meta narrative feel, they do not have the same scale as GJS (which IMO is a good thing).