Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis by Jared Diamond
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The book is too dense and long to cover everything I liked, or didn’t, so I just mention that I particularly liked his treatment of Japan. I find his account to have nailed it. I did my college year abroad there and his description meets my memories 99%. I read the entire book except for most of the final chapter and Epilogue. I think he is/was hopelessly naive and arrogant to write advice to a nation on how we change change as a country in a book. Does he think any significant part of the nation will read or that any percent of those who do will change their world view because of it? Not a chance. Since he talks there about the possibility of nuclear war, I will weigh in on that. The fear is justified as such a war would be terrible, but I believe the aftermath has been misjudged, perhaps even exaggerated. We have many examples of places that have experienced a major nuclear explosion or contamination – Nagasaki, Hiroshima, the Bikini Islands, Chernobyl, Tohoku, Japan. I visited the nuclear parks in Hiroshima and Nagasaki right at the epicenters. They are teeming with life, mostly people, but birds and plants and animals, too. The same is true even of the Pacific islands where nuclear tests took place, although without people now. If it happens, the destruction will be localized and will pass and people will find ways to make at least most currently inhabited areas of the world livable.