Reviews
I've read 2 books by Jared Diamond and the impression This books builds a framework to analyze the national crisis using as comparison the psychology of a human crisis. When you start to read it, and you see that the framework is build around a very small sample and handpicked countries to analyze, you can sure raise some questions on this and can make an easy argument to counter it. Although, as I should expect from Jared Diamon is that, he knows and acknowledges it. I would have liked to read some more in depth analyzes and more research on this, but it wouldn't be easy to read for a person outside the field.
DNF on page 27 - a new personal record. I knew going in that Jared Diamond's writing isn't for me but I guess it's been long enough since I read Guns, Germs & Genocide that I forgot how literally awful he is at A) being a historian and B) being a person. Page 10: "... between 1956 and 1961, when Britain scrapped all of its remaining battleships, experienced its first race riots, had to begin granting independence to its African colonies, and saw the Suez Crisis expose the humiliating loss of its ability to act independently as a world power." HAD TO BEGIN GRANTING INDEPENDENCE TO ITS AFRICAN COLONIES. this is the most imperialist colonizer apologist bullshit i've read since GG&S. Page 18: "This is a comparative book. It doesn't devote its pages to discussing just one nation. Instead, it divides those pages among seven nations, so that those nations can be compared." emphasis in original. the patronizing tone is real. And then by the time I got to the opening chapter, the first five pages of which are a "personal crisis" in which our dear author must choose between continuing his graduate studies at Cambridge and doing literally anything else he wanted in his life - with no concern for money or any type of security! - and the reader is supposed to... cheer, I guess, when he figures out how to measure a gallbladder? That anecdote is supposed to serve as an introduction into the idea of personal crises and, because his wife is a psychologist, therapeutic interventions for people in crisis. And all of a sudden we're in Freud 101. What the fuck is this book about??? Can you stop writing books and go back to measuring gallbladders???
Gosto imenso de Jared Diamond, por isso nunca me canso de o ler e ouvir. É verdade que ele tende a realizar um trabalho altamente especulativo sobre objetos de estudo que à primeira vista poderiam ser tratados de forma mais empírica, mas é isso que o torna tão interessante, porque não hesita em trabalhar nas fronteiras das múltiplas disciplinas para encontrar novas respostas e novas formas de compreender o mundo. Neste seu mais recente livro Diamond faz um cruzamento direto entre a Psicologia, em particular as abordagens ao tratamento de crises pessoais, e a História Económica de países inteiros. O resultado apresentado, 12 passos para lidar com as crises, terá a sua relevância e também limitações, mas gostei particularmente das sínteses que Diamond traçou das crises dos diferentes países retratados — Finlândia, Japão, Chile, Indonesia, Alemanha, Australia e EUA. O resto está no blog em: https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.com...
A bit repetitive but Jared Diamond is has a great narrative style. The book is a bit slow as compared to Collapse and his other writings. The analysis of Japan during the Meiji Restoration was neatly done as well as the narration on the presidency under the Pinochet regime in Chile. Decent read but will take time to get through!
This is a well-researched book that contains a lot of good information and salient points, but no coherent thesis to tie it all together. I'm a huge fan of Jared Diamond's previous books, and it's clear that he is immensely knowledgeable on a variety of subjects. Where this book fell short for me was its sprawling attempt to cover too many disparate topics over too small a space. The chapters on case studies of countries that had experienced crises were informative but a bit dry. I enjoyed his discussion of the current factors likely to lead to a national crisis in the US (political polarization, rising economic inequality and decreasing socio-economic mobility, and declining investment in education) and would've been interested in a book exploring those topics more in depth, but I know it's more his style to write these big, comparative, cross-cultural analyses. This was a difficult one for me to rate because ultimately it's worth reading, but it's not quite at the same level as his previous works, so I would put Upheaval on the lower end of the four-star spectrum and Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse on the higher end.
