He reminds you what those principles are as he considers each case. I'm not sure that he's totally successful in this, or that the framework is actually a useful tool for analyzing politcial crises or deciding on solutions.

The epilogue contains his predictions for the world. As with most books like this, the historical analysis seems much better than the attempts at future prognostication, where personal politics inevitably factor in to the equations. In western thought...  Read More

The epilogue is forty pages long and meandering. Sadder still is the book could have been cut to a third of it's length. At least, it is not as long-winded as a steven pinker tome, but it was not very interesting to me.

The bottom 10 percent consumes as much as 32 times the amount that people in developing countries do. Partisan gridlock, restrictive voter registration laws and lack of spending on education are only crises if you think that government has the solutio...  Read More

In addition to omissions, outright errors exist. Why these were “pruned’ implies nefarious action without any explanation. The author presents data in an easy-to-read manner, but the conclusions he draws are niave at best.

The book's biggest omission is diamond’s failure to suggest ways to begin overcoming american political polarization. Diamond rightfully says (p.