books @ cc.

How our animal heritage affects the way we live
by Jared Diamond (1991)

The theme of the book, “[h]ow the human species changed, within a short time, from just another species of big mammal to a world conqueror; and how we acquired the capacity to reverse all that progress overnight,” would be recognisable to readers familiar with Diamond’s later books (Why is Sex Fun?, Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse).

Chronicle of the Future
by Svetlana Alexievich (1997)

( New version from the Dalkey Archive Press available )

“This is not a book about Chernobyl, but about the world of Chernobyl,” so Alexievich wrote, and indeed, instead of writing about what happened, she compiled a wide range of oral, first-hand testimony, accounts, sometimes occasional rant and condemnations from broad range of people involved and/or affected by Chernobyl. Plenty of tongue-in-cheek resignations in the face of something big and unknown gone wrong. Alexievich is mostly invisible—she allows everyone to speak for themselves—although a certain amount of editing has definitely been done. Alexievich realises that “suffering is our refuge”, that, as one of her interviewee said, people who haven’t suffered hungered for stories about suffering— “cheap philosophy”.

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive
by Jared Diamond (2005)

Whereas Guns, Germs and Steel explains why history unfolded differently on different continents with varying successes, Collapse gives the other side of the coin: how societies crumble. While the main points of the book emphasize environmental and ecological factors (mostly self-induced), Diamond never reduced it to a mere environmentalist’ diatribe, pragmatically writing as a middlemen with experience of both environmental problems and of business realities.