Upheaval

March 15, 2019
The MacArthur fellow and Pulitzer Prize winner looks at how societies respond to crises.A crisis is a turning point, a time when decision and action are necessary. As Diamond (Geography/UCLA; The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?, 2012, etc.) puts it, it is a "moment of truth" that calls on us to cope. We do so as individuals following such adaptations as we are able to draw on, including recognizing that there's a problem, being honest in appraising where the fault lies and what can be done, and then drawing on flexibility and intelligence to work things out. So it is with societies. Diamond astutely examines seven turning points in the history of the world, some of them little known--e.g., the Winter War between Russian and Finland, which briefly pushed Finland into the Nazi camp and involved a humiliating defeat first for the Soviets and then for the Finns. Nations "do or don't undertake honest self-appraisal," writes the author: The Russians scarcely acknowledge a war that remains strong in Finnish history, just as Germany, the epicenter of Nazism, at first tried to brush aside that history and then became the first among nations in acknowledging guilt and making sure such crimes would not be repeated. For its part, Japan has not adequately owned up to the historical chain that made it into a modern nation and then a brutal imperial power, while the United States has yet to reckon with the crisis of slavery, racial enmity, and civil war. Diamond seeks commonalities and distinctions. In his case studies, only Indonesia lacks a strong sense of national identity, which is explainable given its rather recent emergence as a nation and which helps explain its reluctance to work through a traumatic civil war in which millions may have died. Just so, honest self-appraisal is sometimes hard to come by, as when modern Americans shun scientific reasoning, "a very bad portent, because science is basically just the accurate description and understanding of the real world."Vintage Diamond; of a piece with Collapse (2004) and likely to appeal to the same broad audience.

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March 25, 2019
Drastic national course corrections flow from complex social psychologies, according to this rich but unfocused treatise in comparative history. Pulitzer-winning UCLA geography professor Diamond (Guns, Germs and Steel) examines episodes of national upheaval and change, including Japan’s opening to the West after 1853, Finland’s accommodation of the Soviet Union after they fought during WWII, and Chile’s whipsawing from Salvador Allende’s socialist regime to Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship to liberal democracy. He analyzes these developments through the lens of “crisis therapy,” a psychological treatment program for trauma victims, identifying 12 factors that help societies rebound from crises, including honest self-appraisal, a strong identity and core values, flexibility, help from external sources, and freedom from geopolitical constraints. He also applies these factors to present-day crises, including Japan’s population decline, America’s political polarization, and climate change. Diamond offers far-ranging, erudite, lucid accounts of historical cruxes, spiced by sharp-eyed personal observations—he seems to have been everywhere—of national characters and quirks. Unfortunately, his social-psychological framework lacks the concise explanatory power of his books on geographical and environmental influences on history; his factors often seem like squishy truisms that fit any happenstance without proving much beyond the importance of realism and adaptability. The result is a suite of notable historical retrospectives that point in no singular direction.

March 15, 2019
A new comparative study by big-picture thinker Diamond (The World until Yesterday, 2013) uses concepts from the treatment of psychological trauma to discuss nations in crisis. He examines seven historic examples, including Meiji Japan, forced from isolation by Commodore Perry; Finland, caught between belligerent neighbors in WWII; autocracy in Pinochet's Chile; civil strife in Indonesia; and postwar rebuilding in Germany. Each is evaluated against a matrix of factors lifted from the lexicon of personal crises: awareness that one is in a crisis, including ego strength; honest self-appraisal; experience of previous crises, and flexibility. Each case history reveals salient points about selective change, or its absence, among nations, laying the groundwork for what Diamond really wants to talk about: the future of the U.S. as a nation and of the planet as a place to exist. It's a cogent discussion and a plea for perspective; some of today's crises have been weathered before. Diamond attributes his new focus on national psychology to his wife, UCLA clinical psychiatrist Marie Cohen, and, in spite of its rather formal presentation, this is notably a more personal work for Diamond, who shares his experience with each country studied, folding in anecdotes and impressions.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Given Diamond's media visibility and the enormous popularity of his earlier works, this will be avidly requested.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

Starred review from May 1, 2019

In Guns, Germs, and Steel and later in Collapse, Diamond (geography, Univ. of California Los Angeles) demonstrated the ability to extract answers from unwieldy masses of information and apply it to understanding questions of today. This newest offering complements the former two and completes the author's trilogy by focusing on the resources six nations drew on to deal with crisis. The cases are: Finland after the Soviets invaded in 1939; Japan following the arrival of U.S. Commodore Matthew C. Perry in 1853; Chile post-Augusto Pinochet; Indonesia after presidents Sukarno and Suharto; Germany in the aftermath of World War II; and Australia's demographic transformation into the multiethnic society it is today. Diamond draws on crisis therapy to compose a list of enablers of change and applies them to these nations' behavior in their time of stress. In conclusion, he considers current problems, especially political partisanship, facing Japan and the United States, and briefly discusses other global threats to political stability. VERDICT Diamond is a master at explicating matters of pressing importance. His earlier books garnered a vast readership, and there will be equal demand for this one, too. [See Prepub Alert, 11/5/18.]--David Keymer, Cleveland

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2019

Closing out a trilogy begun with the two million-copy-selling Guns, Germs and Steel and continued with 830,000-copy-selling Collapse, Pulitzer Prize winner Diamond seeks answers to contemporary U.S. and world upheaval by asking how some nations have effectively survived identity-defining crisis. The seven nations studied include Japan, broken open by U.S. commodore Perry; Finland facing the Soviet invasion; and Chile confronting Pinochet's regime. With a 150,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2018

Closing out a trilogy begun with the two million-copy-selling Guns, Germs and Steel and continued with 830,000-copy-selling Collapse, Pulitzer Prize winner Diamond seeks answers to contemporary U.S. and world upheaval by asking how some nations have effectively survived identity-defining crisis. The seven nations studied include Japan, broken open by U.S. commodore Perry; Finland facing the Soviet invasion; and Chile confronting Pinochet's regime. With a 150,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.