History
Collapse - How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Publisher: Penguin, 2005, 592pp, 1st ed.
Diamond casts a wide net in the realms of history, geography, and science to address questions essential to humanity's continued survival.
Table of contents
| Prologue : a tale of two farms | 1 | |
| Pt. 1 | Modern Montana | 25 |
| Ch. 1 | Under Montana's big sky | 27 |
| Pt. 2 | Past societies | 77 |
| Ch. 2 | Twilight at Easter | 79 |
| Ch. 3 | The last people alive : Pitcairn and Henderson Islands | 120 |
| Ch. 4 | The ancient ones : the Anasazi and their neighbors | 136 |
| Ch. 5 | The Maya collapses | 157 |
| Ch. 6 | The Viking prelude and fugues | 178 |
| Ch. 7 | Norse Greenland's flowering | 211 |
| Ch. 8 | Norse Greenland's end | 248 |
| Ch. 9 | Opposite paths to success | 277 |
| Pt. 3 | Modern societies | 309 |
| Ch. 10 | Malthus in Africa : Rwanda's genocide | 311 |
| Ch. 11 | One Island, two peoples, two histories : the Dominican Republic and Haiti | 329 |
| Ch. 12 | China, lurching giant | 358 |
| Ch. 13 | "Mining" Australia | 378 |
| Pt. 4 | Practical lessons | 417 |
| Ch. 14 | Why do some societies make disastrous decisions? | 419 |
| Ch. 15 | Big businesses and the environment : different conditions, different outcomes | 441 |
| Ch. 16 | The world as a polder : what does it all mean to us today? | 486 |