This Week's Reads

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
By Jared Diamond (Viking, $29.95)

Henderson Island is a remote dot of land in the southern Pacific Ocean. The whole island is composed of a coral-derived limestone called makatea, which easily shatters into razor-sharp shards; it rises toward the south into a jagged landscape of scarps and fissures capable of shredding the toughest hiking boots. The rock shredded the boots of Marshall Weisler, an archaeologist who spent five hours covering the five-mile crossing of Henderson from north to south. On the southern edge of the island, where the limestone cliffs drop to the sea, he found a crude shelter. Barefoot Polynesians had been there before him.

This is one of innumerable anecdotes that enrich this latest book by scientist/ science writer Jared Diamond. Unfortunately, the book needs all the enrichment it can get. Diamond's earlier best sellers concentrated on broad but focused subjects: The Third Chimpanzee examined human nature and society in the light of the latest anthropological studies of people as apes; Guns, Germs, and Steel asked and—amazingly—plausibly answered the question: "Why did the phenomenon we call civilization develop just where it did, and why didn't it develop elsewhere?" The Pulitzer Prize–winning 1997 Guns was not just science writing at its best; it was science in the making, science other scientists could use.

Collapse is an attempt to answer an equally large and much more urgent question: Why do some highly organized, sophisticated societies endure for millennia, while others fade away or suddenly crumble? Answering this question—and Diamond does answer it, after a fashion—requires taking an enormous number of factors into consideration, synthesizing vast amounts of historical, geographic, and statistical information.

Diamond, a fine and trenchant writer at his best, hasn't found a natural way to structure this immense account; the chapters bump cumbersomely along, starting in contemporary Montana, then off to Easter Island and the South Pacific, back to the Anasazi of the American Southwest, south to the Maya of Yucatán, then to the freezing north for four chapters about the Vikings' adventures in Iceland and Greenland. These 300-odd pages are salted with pockets of hugely entertaining and memorable nuggets, but getting from each one to the next is often as laboriously painful as traversing makatea barefoot. The book shows signs of hasty and slipshod editing; the author seems to have been rushed to complete it, and it lacks the extraordinary cogency and terseness of his earlier work.

The latter half of the book, dealing with contemporary cases of collapse and sustainability (Rwanda, Haiti, the Dominican Republic) and headlong development in China and Australia, is inevitably less interesting, though more topical. His final section on "practical lessons" verges on lameness. Admirers of Diamond's earlier books will probably want to have this one as well, if only for dipping into here and there or scanning topics in the index. But they, too, will hope that the author finds a better fit between form and subject with his next effort; he's too brilliant a miner to be wasted hauling so much slag. ROGER DOWNEY

Jared Diamond will appear at Town Hall (1119 Eighth Ave., 206-624-6600; $5), 7:30 p.m. Fri., Jan. 28.

The Children's Blizzard
By David Laskin (HarperCollins, $24.95)

Given estimates that over 200,000 people may have perished in the Indian Ocean tsunami last month, the deaths of 250 to 500 individuals during a ferocious American snowstorm way back on Jan. 12, 1888, may seem trifling. Yet with Blizzard, Seattle writer David Laskin leaves readers feeling hardly less flabbergasted by the results of that historical tempest that howled across the Dakota Territory, Nebraska, and Minnesota on what had begun as an unseasonably warm day, freezing cattle solid where they stood, burying landmarks that might have led disoriented farmers to safety, and killing children who'd only just been dismissed from their country schools.

The apathetic brutality of Mother Nature is what would endure in the memories of prairie dwellers who survived the horizontal snows and 40-below temperatures of that day. Many impecunious immigrants from Scandinavia and Germany had been lured to America's heartland by promises of soil "so black and rich that as somebody said, you had only 'to tickle it with a plow, and it would laugh with a beautiful harvest.'" The 1888 blizzard didn't simply rob late-day pioneers of their families; it laid waste to the very foundations of their hope. Had the national weather-forecasting agency of that era—the U.S. Army Signal Corps, with its closest office in St. Paul, Minn.—been less mired in politics and procedures and better able to post prompt warnings of the storm, casualties might've been reduced. As it was, fathers died wrapping their offspring in their arms, girls and boys lost limbs to frostbite, and even some folks who lived through the meteorological disaster later succumbed, their hearts stopping as they were warmed too quickly. Laskin notes that as a result of that blizzard, coupled with subsequent droughts and financial downturns, "over 60 percent" of pioneer clans abandoned the Plains states by the late 1890s. (See the excellent 1998 Bad Land, from fellow Seattle resident Jonathan Raban, for more on the false promises sold to prairie settlers.)