Published by ALLEN LANE , 2019, softcover, illustrated, 500 pages, some marks to cover otherwise condition: basically as new.
n his landmark international bestsellers Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, Jared Diamond transformed our understanding of what makes civilizations rise and fall. Now in the third book in this monumental trilogy, he reveals how successful nations recover from crisis.
Diamond shows us how seven countries have survived defining upheavals in the recent past - from the forced opening up of Japan and the Soviet invasion of Finland to the Pinochet regime in Chile - through selective change, a process of painful self-appraisal and adaptation more commonly associated with personal trauma. Looking ahead to the future, he investigates whether the United States, and the world, are squandering their natural advantages and are on a devastating path towards catastrophe. Is this fate inevitable? Or can we still learn from the lessons of the past?
Exhibiting the awe-inspiring grasp of history, geography, economics and anthropology that marks all Diamond's work, Upheaval reveals how both nations and individuals can become more resilient. The result is a book epic in scope, but also his most personal yet. An example of presumed lack of models is provided by the U.S. today, for which belief in American exceptionalism translates into the widespread belief that the U.S. has nothing to learn from Canada and Western European democracies: not even from their solutions to issues that arise for every country, such as health care, education, immigration, prisons, and security in old age--issues about which most Americans are dissatisfied with our American solutions but still refuse to learn from Canadian or Western European solutions.
It has been a source of frustration for me that Americans have developed so many prejudices against Europe and even their North American partnerships. We do so believe in our exceptionalism that we refuse to recognize that someone else somewhere else knows how to do something better than we do. When I read about the Roman Empire, one of their strengths, that always impressed me and helped them become the most powerful nation the world has ever seen, until the United States, was their ability to recognize and assimilate good ideas from other cultures. They assimilated the very best from every culture they encountered. As Jared Diamond points out, look at how many of the United States winners of Nobel Prizes were immigrants or first generation descendents from immigrants. The US may have provided the catalyst for those exceptional people to reach their full potential, but the synergy of bringing people together from different cultures,with different eyes, with different experiences, leads to amazing breakthroughs in science, economics, literature, art, etc. So is American exceptionalism really based on American ingenuity, or is it based upon the synergy of all those fatherlands/motherlands contributing to the melting pot of what makes us Americans?
