Hello world!

I am going to start a new serries of blog posts called, “Dave Reads” for lack of a better name.  I read quite a few books and essentially, this will be my thoughts on most of these books chronicled here.  If nothing else, this will just be a good way for me to track my notes on the books I have read, but if some of you out there get anything out of it, so much the better.  I will post a link to each book in the post on Amazon and there will be a webstore with all of the books listed there as the posts add up.  Full disclosure, Amazon is telling me they will send me an affiliate fee for the clicks and purchases made from the webstore, but I am by no means expecting to make much actual money from this small posting exercise.

The books I read generally fall into two categories:  Entertainment and Business.

I do not have any sort of classic or traditional business training other than the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Business Program (Which is great, by the way) but I have read a TON of business books.
Stay tuned for those reviews, although they may be a bit dry.

 

         The other category is entertainment books and this is usually Sci-Fi, biography, the classics such as The Count of Monte Christo, and sometimes fantasy like J.R.R Tolkien.

 

 

Our first book is Collapse / How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond.

This book was originally published in 2005 and the edition I got was published in 2011.  I finished it this morning (November 1, 2024) and found it to be an interesting and relatively quick read, defying the 542 page count.  This book is somewhat academic in nature and the author has a tendency to repeat himself several times, mostly to bring in additional evidence to support his conclusions.  Again, despite the academic nature of the writing, I found the book to be an entertaining, engaging, and quick read.  Diamond details the rise and fall of several societies throughout history including the societies of Easter Island, Pitcairn and Henderson Islands, The Anasazi, the Maya, Vikings, Norse Greenland settlements and a few more modern societies including America’s Montana and Rwanda’s Genocide.  He also summarizes the Dominican Republic and Haiti as well as relatively successful modern societies of China and Australia.  Generally speaking, the author draws the conclusion of population growth and depletion of resources as the predominate cause of the crash of these civilizations.  If a society is able to maintain their resources of water, timber, and airable farmland and balance these resources with their population growth, a society will continue to support itself.

Some more specific portions of the book stood out to me:

At the end of Chapter 2 on Easter Island, Diamond states, and I paraphrase, most people find the fall of the Easter Island society particularly haunting.  The parallels between Easter Island and the whole modern world are chillingly obvious.  Today, we share everything on a global scale due to international trade, jet airlines, etc…  There is nowhere else for us to flee if our troubles increase.  Easter Island is a metaphor for what may lie ahead for our modern society as we continue to increase our population and deplete the resources of our entire collective planet.

In Chapter 13, Parallels are drawn between ancient Easter Island and  modern day Australia in terms of resource scarcity and increasing population, however, there is time for Australia to correct course.

At the end of Chapter 14, Diamond proposes the philosophy of societies collectively needing to choose which core values to hold on to and which ones to discard.   Should we preserve resources or slow the rate of population increase or both or neither?  The optimistic side of all these relatively pessimistic case studies is the simple fact we can learn from our collective history the way none of the past societies were able to.