Diamond Fashion Ruby Emerald Necklace Sets 96

Diamond Fashion Ruby Emerald Necklace Sets.

By Farzana Aamir.

Winner of a Pulitzer Prize, Japan's Cosmos Prize, and a MacArthur fellowship, Jared Diamond has become the best-known writer to explore world history. Guns, Germs, and Steel, his third book, has achieved unusual success among popular audiences as well as in high school and college courses. 

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    Diamond's recently published Collapse: How Some Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed recounts the environmental disasters engulfing a variety of peoples, among them Easter Islanders, Greenland's 11th-14th century Norse settlers, Mayans, and contemporary Rwandans and Haitians. Yet Diamond insists that choice plays a role in a society's survival. Cultural choice (in this case, to continue agriculture rather than adapt to an increasingly hostile Arctic environment) doomed Greenland's Norse but not the neighboring Inuit. According to Diamond, not all choices are bad ones: political decisions have, he argues, thus far saved the Dominican Republic from neighboring Haiti's fate.

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     While he takes no partisan shots, Diamond's agenda in Collapse is more explicitly political than in Guns, Germs, and Steel. He provocatively begins the work with an extended tour of environmental damage in western Montana, challenging readers to connect the dots between previous environmental collapse and conditions in the United States. 

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    While Guns, Germs, and Steel mined the past to better understand the present, Collapse uses history to alter the future. 4

    This interview was recorded on March 18, 2005 at Crossroads School in Santa Monica, California. It has been edited, combining exchanges from a Q & A session with the school's AP World History class with an interview, conducted the same day with WHC's Tom Laichas.