How can our world best avoid committing ecological suicide?

Jared Diamond's new book is coming out at the end of the year. Publishers Weekly gave it a "starred review."

Brilliant, illuminating, and immensely absorbing, a fascinating comparative study of societies that have, sometimes fatally, undermined their own ecological foundations.

Diamond examines storied examples of human economic and social collapse, and even extinction. He explores patterns ... that lead inexorably to vicious circles ...

He finds today's global, technologically advanced civilization very far from solving the problems that plagued primitive, isolated communities in the remote past.

Diamond is a brilliant expositor of everything from anthropology to zoology, providing a lucid background of scientific lore to support a stimulating, incisive historical account of these many declines and falls. Readers will find his book an enthralling, and disturbing, reminder of the indissoluble links that bind humans to nature.

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed