Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Jared Diamond Ph.D.
4.5 on Amazon
10 HN comments
Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time
Dava Sobel
4.5 on Amazon
5 HN comments
The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War
Malcolm Gladwell and Pushkin Industries
4.4 on Amazon
3 HN comments
Energy and Civilization: A History (The MIT Press)
Vaclav Smil
4.6 on Amazon
3 HN comments
Bowling Alone: Revised and Updated: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
Robert D. Putnam
4.3 on Amazon
3 HN comments
Common Sense: The Origin and Design of Government
Thomas Paine and Coventry House Publishing
4.8 on Amazon
2 HN comments
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: Revised Edition
Jared Diamond
4.5 on Amazon
2 HN comments
The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World
Vincent Bevins, Tim Paige, et al.
4.8 on Amazon
2 HN comments
Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork
Reeves Wiedeman
4.4 on Amazon
2 HN comments
Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World (Politics of Place)
Tim Marshall
4.6 on Amazon
2 HN comments
How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States
Daniel Immerwahr
4.7 on Amazon
2 HN comments
Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right
Jane Mayer
4.7 on Amazon
2 HN comments
Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
Ibram X. Kendi, Christopher Dontrell Piper, et al.
4.8 on Amazon
1 HN comments
In Cold Blood
Truman Capote
4.6 on Amazon
1 HN comments
A History of the World in 6 Glasses
Tom Standage
4.6 on Amazon
1 HN comments
visiblinkonMar 30, 2021
foxyladonJuly 16, 2021
Human ingenuity is impressive, but not infinite. I recommend Collapse by Jared Diamond. It's a long read, but every single society he examines thought they were doing great but ended up eating each other (literally) within a couple of generations once some vital resource dried up. Human ingenuity failed all of them.
I'll give you peak oil: our ingenuity is already finding viable alternative energy solutions. But climate change is going to destabilise so much more - food, water, land, security - that I'm pessimistic that our civilisation will last more than a few generations.
So far we've only discovered more positive feedback (e.g. methane from melting Siberia), when we desperately need strong negative feedback. A bit like Covid, where everyone assumed the ingenious new vaccines would get us back to normal in a couple of months, but mutations, politics and social dynamics mean we're still very much on the back foot.
But hey, I'm 60 and still a lefty so obviously no brain and just a bullshit doomer :) But do grab a copy of Collapse, there are a lot of "whoa!" insights and it's a fascinating read.