Collapse

Collapse PDF Author: Jared Diamond
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101157828
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 646

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Book Description
This title has been removed from sale by Penguin Group, USA.

Collapse

Collapse PDF Author: Jared Diamond
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141976969
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 608

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Book Description
From the author of Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive is a visionary study of the mysterious downfall of past civilizations. Now in a revised edition with a new afterword, Jared Diamond's Collapse uncovers the secret behind why some societies flourish, while others founder - and what this means for our future. What happened to the people who made the forlorn long-abandoned statues of Easter Island? What happened to the architects of the crumbling Maya pyramids? Will we go the same way, our skyscrapers one day standing derelict and overgrown like the temples at Angkor Wat? Bringing together new evidence from a startling range of sources and piecing together the myriad influences, from climate to culture, that make societies self-destruct, Jared Diamond's Collapse also shows how - unlike our ancestors - we can benefit from our knowledge of the past and learn to be survivors. 'A grand sweep from a master storyteller of the human race' - Daily Mail 'Riveting, superb, terrifying' - Observer 'Gripping ... the book fulfils its huge ambition, and Diamond is the only man who could have written it' - Economis 'This book shines like all Diamond's work' - Sunday Times

The Collapse

The Collapse PDF Author: Mary Sarotte
Publisher: Basic Books (AZ)
ISBN: 0465064949
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
On the night of November 9, 1989, massive crowds surged toward the Berlin Wall, drawn by an announcement that caught the world by surprise: East Germans could now move freely to the West. The Wall—infamous symbol of divided Cold War Europe—seemed to be falling. But the opening of the gates that night was not planned by the East German ruling regime—nor was it the result of a bargain between either Ronald Reagan or George H.W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. It was an accident. In The Collapse, prize-winning historian Mary Elise Sarotte reveals how a perfect storm of decisions made by daring underground revolutionaries, disgruntled Stasi officers, and dictatorial party bosses sparked an unexpected series of events culminating in the chaotic fall of the Wall. With a novelist’s eye for character and detail, she brings to vivid life a story that sweeps across Budapest, Prague, Dresden, and Leipzig and up to the armed checkpoints in Berlin. We meet the revolutionaries Roland Jahn, Aram Radomski, and Siggi Schefke, risking it all to smuggle the truth across the Iron Curtain; the hapless Politburo member Günter Schabowski, mistakenly suggesting that the Wall is open to a press conference full of foreign journalists, including NBC’s Tom Brokaw; and Stasi officer Harald Jäger, holding the fort at the crucial border crossing that night. Soon, Brokaw starts broadcasting live from Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, where the crowds are exulting in the euphoria of newfound freedom—and the dictators are plotting to restore control. Drawing on new archival sources and dozens of interviews, The Collapse offers the definitive account of the night that brought down the Berlin Wall.

Understanding Collapse

Understanding Collapse PDF Author: Guy D. Middleton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110715149X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 463

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Book Description
In this lively survey, Guy D. Middleton critically examines our ideas about collapse - how we explain it and how we have constructed potentially misleading myths around collapses - showing how and why collapse of societies was a much more complex phenomenon than is often admitted.

The Great Collapse

The Great Collapse PDF Author: Jeff W. Horton
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781629896557
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
While scientists prepare for a massive solar flare heading towards the earth, a hostile foreign government steals a top-secret, experimental weapon. When they use the EMP weapon to attack America however, the result is the immediate and catastrophic loss of modern technology all over the planet. The president calls upon Dr. James White to lead a group of scientists and theologians in an effort to develop a plan that will offer humanity a second chance at civilization. When societies begin to unravel, refugees flee the anarchy in the cities as people learn how to survive in a world without technology, a world for which they are not prepared. Will humanity survive this catastrophic event? Join author Jeff Horton for a journey into the chaotic and perilous new world of The Great Collapse.

Confronting Collapse

Confronting Collapse PDF Author: Michael C. Ruppert
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
ISBN: 1603582991
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
The book that inspired the movie Collapse. The world is running short of energy-especially cheap, easy-to-find oil. Shortages, along with resulting price increases, threaten industrialized civilization, the global economy, and our entire way of life. In Confronting Collapse, author Michael C. Ruppert, a former LAPD narcotics officer turned investigative journalist, details the intricate connections between money and energy, including the ways in which oil shortages and price spikes triggered the economic crash that began in September 2008. Given the 96 percent correlation between economic growth and greenhouse gas emissions and the unlikelihood of economic growth without a spike in energy use, Ruppert argues that we are not, in fact, on the verge of economic recovery, but on the verge of complete collapse. Ruppert's truth is not merely inconvenient. It is utterly devastating. But there is still hope. Ruppert outlines a 25-point plan of action, including the creation of a second strategic petroleum reserve for the use of state and local governments, the immediate implementation of a national Feed-in Tariff mandating that electric utilities pay 3 percent above market rates for all surplus electricity generated from renewable sources, a thorough assessment of soil conditions nationwide, and an emergency action plan for soil restoration and sustainable agriculture.

After Collapse

After Collapse PDF Author: Glenn M. Schwartz
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 9780816529360
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
From the Euphrates Valley to the southern Peruvian Andes, early complex societies have risen and fallen, but in some cases they have also been reborn. Prior archaeological investigation of these societies has focused primarily on emergence and collapse. This is the first book-length work to examine the question of how and why early complex urban societies have reappeared after periods of decentralization and collapse. Ranging widely across the Near East, the Aegean, East Asia, Mesoamerica, and the Andes, these cross-cultural studies expand our understanding of social evolution by examining how societies were transformed during the period of radical change now termed “collapse.” They seek to discover how societal complexity reemerged, how second-generation states formed, and how these re-emergent states resembled or differed from the complex societies that preceded them. The contributors draw on material culture as well as textual and ethnohistoric data to consider such factors as preexistent institutions, structures, and ideologies that are influential in regeneration; economic and political resilience; the role of social mobility, marginal groups, and peripheries; and ethnic change. In addition to presenting a number of theoretical viewpoints, the contributors also propose reasons why regeneration sometimes does not occur after collapse. A concluding contribution by Norman Yoffee provides a critical exegesis of “collapse” and highlights important patterns found in the case histories related to peripheral regions and secondary elites, and to the ideology of statecraft. After Collapse blazes new research trails in both archaeology and the study of social change, demonstrating that the archaeological record often offers more clues to the “dark ages” that precede regeneration than do text-based studies. It opens up a new window on the past by shifting the focus away from the rise and fall of ancient civilizations to their often more telling fall and rise. CONTRIBUTORS Bennet Bronson Arlen F. Chase Diane Z. Chase Christina A. Conlee Lisa Cooper Timothy S. Hare Alan L. Kolata Marilyn A. Masson Gordon F. McEwan Ellen Morris Ian Morris Carlos Peraza Lope Kenny Sims Miriam T. Stark Jill A. Weber Norman Yoffee

Questioning Collapse

Questioning Collapse PDF Author: Patricia A. McAnany
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521515726
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Questioning Collapse challenges those scholars and popular writers who advance the thesis that societies - past and present - collapse because of behavior that destroyed their environments or because of overpopulation. In a series of highly accessible and closely argued essays, a team of internationally recognized scholars bring history and context to bear in their radically different analyses of iconic events, such as the deforestation of Easter Island, the cessation of the Norse colony in Greenland, the faltering of nineteenth-century China, the migration of ancestral peoples away from Chaco Canyon in the American southwest, the crisis and resilience of Lowland Maya kingship, and other societies that purportedly "collapsed." Collectively, these essays demonstrate that resilience in the face of societal crises, rather than collapse, is the leitmotif of the human story from the earliest civilizations to the present. Scrutinizing the notion that Euro-American colonial triumphs were an accident of geography, Questioning Collapse also critically examines the complex historical relationship between race and political labels of societal "success" and "failure."

Collapse

Collapse PDF Author: Phillip Wearne
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
What happens when the very ground beneath your feet gives way? In Collapse, Philip Wearne tells the stories behind the worst structural engineering disasters of the last fifty years, and the forensic engineers who investigated their causes. Using expert testimonies from scientific investigators, Wearne studies eleven high-profile cases of catastrophic structural collapse, from The Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City and the Hartford Civic Center in Connecticut, to the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Sometimes, if these disasters have a single cause, it is a small flaw that spawns a chain reaction -- for instance, the miniscule flaw in the metal of one eyebar of the Point Pleasant Bridge on the Ohio River. Usually, though, and more alarmingly, the causes are human. Mistakes, misunderstandings, incompetence, greed, and corruption: every facet of human failing is represented in these structural collapses. This makes the investigation of these failures -- by agencies like the Failure Analysis Associates, who can have close to two thousand investigations ongoing at any one time -- dirty and dangerous business. Wearne's case study takes us deep inside the ever-growing industry of forensic engineering, revealing a group of professionals dedicated to determining the cause of a collapse at any cost, while learning and applying valuable lessons from each failure. Provocative and well-written, Collapse is essential for deepening our understanding of -- and readiness for -- catastrophe.

Collapsed

Collapsed PDF Author: Jenetta Penner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
The world is split in two... and both sides are deadly. In a society of extreme have or have nots, Tenly Hawkins is just trying to improve her future. Born into the Cobalts, the lowest rung of society, she has done everything possible to escape her fate by playing by the rules. Against all odds, she secures a coveted position in the Premier Workforce... and a way out of squalor into Scarlet society. But when her scoundrel of a best friend, Kalib, also secures a spot, she's suspicious. Did he cheat, and will his fortune somehow collapse everything she's worked for? Placed in a high ranking household as a governess, Tenly settles into her new role. That is, until she caught in the middle of growing progressive upheaval due to the inequality of the rich and poor. But it's all being covered up. Her life's dream is not the safe haven Tenly once thought it would be. And if anyone finds out about her secret meetings with Kalib, she can't seem to refuse; it could not only put them both at risk... It could be fatal.

Collapse

Collapse PDF Author: Jared Diamond
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101157828
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 646

Get Book

Book Description
This title has been removed from sale by Penguin Group, USA.