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My 2021 in Books
Every year it is my goal to read 50 books, about one every week. I managed to do so by the skin of my teeth while on winter break at school: finishing the last book on December 31st. While not as great as last year’s 95, I read a lot of great books this year, including 13 in Spanish. Below are my 5 favorites, as well as my least favorite book.
Collapse by Jared Diamond
Current common wisdom from both sides of the political spectrum suggests that the panacea to all our problems is economic growth. Growth lifts people and nations out of poverty, pays down debt, creates technology that saves lives and many more wonderful things. But what happens when a society outruns its resource base by depleting top soil, cutting down forests or running out of surface metal deposits? Or if climatic conditions that allowed large-scale agriculture change for the worse? Diamond explores the fate of historical societies that dealt with these problems. Some, like the Tokugawa of Japan, manage to change their ways of life to prevent collapse. Others however, like Easter Island, the highland Maya, or the Greenland Norse, failed to adapt and were wiped out or reduced greatly in population. Diamond ends the book with a discussion of the modern states most at risk, focusing on China and Australia in particular. This was an excellent ecological perspective on the rise and fall of states, and would…
