If you've ever been at a wedding or conference or on board a United connection from O'Hare, and been cornered by a man with Theories About It All, and you came away thinking, “That was a great experience,” have I got the book for you.
Jared Diamond's “Upheaval” belongs to the genre of 30,000-foot books, which sell an explanation of everything. I travel often and see them a lot: at airport bookstores, where Steven Pinker and Yuval Noah Harari (both of whom blurbed “Upheaval”) and Diamond, of course, deserve permanent shelves; and in the air, where I've noticed that a pretty disproportionate fraction of readers who read in the quiet of 30,000 feet have a preference for writers who write from the viewpoint of 30,000 feet.
So I dug into Diamond's latest, intrigued by his thesis that the way individual humans cope with crisis might teach something to countries. Then, before long, the first mistake caught my eye; soon, the 10th. Then graver ones. Errors, along with generalizations, blind spots and oversights, that called into question the choice to publish. I began to wonder why we give some people, and only some, the platform, and burden, to theorize about everything.
The theory proposed by Diamond — a professor of geography at the University of California at Los Angeles and the author of several books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Guns, Germs and Steel” — is interesting. Human beings go through personal crises all the time. We know a lot about how people change in order to cope — or fail to. What if we applied those lessons to countries in quagmires?
Read Full Article »
