“Successful coping with either external or internal pressure requires selective change. That’s as true of nations as of individuals.” The author describes and compares crises and selective changes, over the course of several decades, in Finland, Japan, Chile, Indonesia, Germany, Australia and the United States. He has a theory (12 factors associated with the resolution of national crises) and he bends each of his samples to fit into that theory. He selected those countries because in most cases he had lived there at some point. One of my problems with the book is that it doesn’t seem like a very rigorous way to select a research sample and I was also put off by the fact that a lot of his research consisted of his questioning his friends and relatives.

I stuck with this book until the bitter end, but it took me forever. This was too dry for me: “Finland is thus the first of our two examples of countries experiencing a crisis due to a sudden external shock. In the next chapter, on Meiji-Era Japan, we shall discuss another country with strong national identity and a distinctive language, much more distinctive culturally then Finland, and with even more drastic selective change, and with outstanding realism like Finland’s but with a different geopolitical situation that permitted Japan to pursue a long-term strategy more independent than Finland’s.” I can see it as a textbook for a class, but frankly I would have dropped this course in college. I am really not in a position to assess whether or not his interpretation of events is correct. Thankfully, I am no longer in school and will not be tested on this material, but he reminded me of professors who had been teaching for decades from the same yellowing pages of notes. I’m afraid this book was not for me. I’ve rounded 2.5 stars up to 3.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

I loved "Guns, Germs and Steel" by this author and had started "Collapse", but was unable to finish it before giving it as a gift for Father's Day a few years back. What I had read of it I liked and did end up getting another copy for me. Just haven't had the time to pick it up again. When I saw that Diamond had a new book out, I was all over it.

This book, didn't disappoint, but it didn't Wow me either. There was a LOT of repetition and the beginning seemed to drag on before he actually reached his main thesis. A lot of groundwork to lay down I suppose, but I found much of it to be boring.

Not the history of other country parts, that was fascinating and I learned a LOT (if you truly believe that we study The Winter War between Finland and Russia in the States, then I have a bridge to sell you. We barely learn about our own history, but I digress.)

So some of this book was un-put-downable, but other parts were, to be slightly rude, a snooze-fest.

That may be more of a reflection of my own interests, intelligence level and comprehension than of the book itself, so don't let my boredom deter you from reading this book. He has a lot to say (sometimes ad nauseum), but he is obviously intelligent and knows his stuff.

Honestly, this is a book that the world leaders, especially in the states, need to read. The wealthy people too. They are dinged because they aren't trying to solve the problems, they are running away, hunkering down to wait for everything to blow over, then to presumably rise up to take their place as the natural rulers of whatever is left, if there is anything worth ruling over after the mushroom clouds melt away.

If anyone can help solve problems, it's those with the money to actually enact programs, studies and educate those who need the education so we don't end up destroying this beautiful blue ball we call "home".

Warning, this book is insanely depressing, because honestly, who wants to see the truth brutally spelled out, that we are most likely doomed? Oh, he tries to be all positive, showing how some countries in the past have managed to overcome crisis by getting their act together, but do we really think that is possible now?

Humanity is so full of contradictions. We have invented art, the written word, music, architecture, and yet we have also pursued war, genocide, rape and torture. We have created plastic, and then poisoned our planet with it. We have beloved family pets who are more members of the family than animals to us, yet we treat the animals that feed us as unfeeling THINGS when they have feelings (physical and emotional) too and we are destroying the habitat and poaching other animals because, basically, we can.

This book will bring all that to the surface and more. You will want to throw this book across the room because it will throw light on the nasty truths of how horrible we can be as a people, as individuals. It pulls no punches, but then, it can't afford to, can it? If we as humanity are to survive, we need to face these truths head-on and instead of blaming someone or thing else, we need to take responsibility and ACT on it.

This book's message, at least I think it is, is that of hope. We aren't gone yet. We have a chance to make things better, to make things right. That is my ultimate hope for humanity. That we actually LEARN and act in a way other than to turn tail and hide, or to ignore it and hope it goes away.

One thing I need to research is how "green" incinerators are at generating energy. I know garbage is a problem and power is a problem and incinerators take trash and burn it and somehow convert that into energy for towns/cities. Is it more positive or negative? However, this book only briefly discusses solar, wind, nuclear and water power. I very rarely see incinerators mentioned anywhere. Is it because it's so obviously a bad thing or because very few people think about it?

Anywho, 3 stars because this book was a bitter pill to swallow and it also dragged in places. I think some editing of the repetition would not have been a bad thing. I also think this is an INCREDIBLY important book that should be read by just about everyone. Highly recommended. Just be prepared to watch cute kitty and puppy videos online every chapter or so to balance out the overwhelming feeling of doom.

My thanks to NetGalley and Little, Brown and Company for an eARC copy of this book to read and review.

UPHEAVAL by Jared Diamond is the latest from the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse. Here, Diamond focuses on "turning points for nations in crisis." To begin, Diamond sets a tone for the book by offering a rather gentle, patient explanation of what he hopes to accomplish with his text. In chapter one, he shares some personal crises and lists twelve factors (e.g., acknowledgment and acceptance of responsibility, getting help from others, and applying core values) related to the outcome. He then indicates a parallel set of factors regarding nations in crisis and, in the following 6 chapters, discusses several pairs of issues like the "sudden upheavals" of Russia's war with Finland and Japan's contact with Commodore Perry or internal pressures and history in countries like Chile and Indonesia. The subsequent section reviews crises currently underway for the world (climate change, nuclear weapons, energy resources), for Japan (economy, demographics, Asian neighbors) and for the United States (political polarization, elections), culminating in an epilogue with "lessons for the future." UPHEAVAL is a thought-provoking analysis that received a starred review from Library Journal, was recommended by Bill Gates, and featured in this interview on PBS Newshour:

embedded video from: https://www.youtube.com/embed/j6aGdn67kgU

other link in live post: https://www.fastcompany.com/90351686/bill-gates-says-to-read-these-5-books-to-change-your-perspective-on-a-world-in-crisis

The author continues in his ability to take a broad topic and narrow it down to a readily understood story. Anyone reading this will have a better grasp of the perils involved in situations similar to the ones delineated in this book

Unfortunately, I could not access this book in the file format that was provided on Netgalley. The listing page did not detail what format it would be delivered. Disappointing, as I would have liked to read this book.

I'm sorry to say that the text I'm getting from this is missing multiple pages, and I don't want to review it in that condition. I've given it a 4 star rating because what I could read was excellent, and because netgalley won't let me send this note without a rating.

Jared Diamond is known as a man of big broad sweeping ideas. Upheaval sets out to answer a very pressing question: Why are some nations able to weather crisis, while other nations spasm into a cycle of violence, miscalculation, and eventual ruin to various degrees. While I didn’t get into it right away because I was sort of confused by the whole notion of how an individual crisis and the crisis of an entire nation could be linked, it becomes much clearer when one sees the crisis factors in action in the case study content.

But at its core, I suspect that Upheaval is really about the notion that how nations weather crises depends on the individuals both in positions of leadership and the collective citizenry who both vote for leaders and in crisis can spur leaders to action for both good and bad. A lot of what comes up in this book is fairly sensible like a leader needs to get a read on the situation including the social and geo-political things that may either help or constrain him.

Perhaps unfortunately there is no “if you do this in a crisis you will be fine.” Every crisis is a different situation governed by both possibilities and constraints and you are always subject to the whims of the moment from the other party since many conflicts cover international state to state conflict. But what we might be able to do thanks to the work of Jared Diamond in Upheaval is see what signs are present in our own nations and encourage leaders to act accordingly.

Jared Diamond, a former-physiologist-turned-geographer, has already penned a perennial bestseller in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) by writing on world history. With his new book, Upheaval (available everywhere May 7), it looks like he might have done it again. If Guns, Germs, and Steel is about the birth and growth of human societies and his 2011 book Collapse is about the death or near-death of those societies, Upheaval is about a turning point, a mid-life crisis, in a nation that determines its course for the future.

Diamond uses a couple of structures in Upheaval that serve the reader well. First, he compares national crises to individual crises. He employs a crisis therapy framework that consists of 12 factors that determine how well an individual will cope with a crisis, then adapts it to analyze how nations respond to crises throughout history. I was skeptical of this tactic at first, as it seemed that nations’ responses to crisis would not be comparable to individual experiences, especially his comparison of an individual’s ego strength to, at the societal level, nationalism (a theme to which we will return later). However, the framework as a whole makes a lot of sense, there seems to be a lot of truth to his analysis, and it served as a helpful organizational device throughout the book.

A second structure was Diamond’s strategy in using nations in which he has personal experience. Each of the seven nations he explores (Finland, Japan, Chile, Indonesia, Germany, Australia, and the United States) are nations in which he has lived for a significant amount of time, made friends, and been enmeshed in the culture. I questioned this too at first because I feared that Diamond would be relying too much on personal experience, but this was not the case. He relied heavily on historical facts and figures, adding in personal anecdotes for a little flourish when helpful.

Given these two structures, I don’t think it is technically correct to call Upheaval a history book as much as, I don’t know, a practical exploration in social studies? If that sounds denigrating, I don’t mean it in any way, and I hope Diamond would agree with me. It is not straightforward history, but instead uses historical examples to explore how nations have dealt with crisis and how they can successfully do so again in the future. The goal is broader than a standard history book.

As a world history teacher, however, I truly enjoyed the history of Diamond’s selected nations is relayed in an approachable style that fully explains and informs. I thought the chapter on the Meiji Restoration in Japan was terrific, I feel like I gained a lot of perspective on post-War Germany, modern Australia, Indonesia, and the Pinochet dictatorship of Chile, and I learned more about Finnish history than I thought I would ever know. I literally just included every one of the selected nations except the United States in that sentence without trying to, if that tells you how balanced the book proves itself to be. I couldn’t even leave one out when writing about how good enjoyable the history is.

In the final part of the book, Diamond spends time analyzing modern, unsolved crises in Japan, the United States, and the world as whole. I think he made good arguments here whether or not I agree with them, so I enjoyed it significantly if also a little bit less than the historical analyses. I would compare this section a little with Hans Rosling’s Factfulness, with a slightly favorable edge to Rosling because of his style.

I can’t speak to how similar Diamond’s analyses are in this book as compared to his others because I haven’t read them, but as a world history teacher I have both heard a lot about and read a lot of excerpts from Guns, Germs, and Steel. It so easily blends popular and academic audiences that it can be found on the Pulitzer Prize list and in a large share of AP World History syllabi while also being available in tiny airport bookstores around the country (the definition of a super-popular book, IMO). Guns, Germs, and Steel is actually rather polarizing in the world history community, the chief criticism coming from those who claim Diamond veers into what is called “geographic determinism”, or the idea that a nation’s geography determines its fate in history. Taken to its extreme, this idea is harmful and can reinforce prejudicial ideas about race. Having not read Guns, I cannot speak to that specific criticism. However, I found no whiff of geographic determinism (beyond Diamond’s fascinating descriptions of nations’ real geographic advantages and disadvantages) in Upheaval.

The one criticism I have, however, is in Diamond’s analysis of nationalism. Nationalism is one of his predictive factors as to whether a nation will successfully navigate a crisis, and I won’t argue with that because he makes several good points and gives many historical examples throughout the book. However, there is no larger examination of the excesses of nationalism. Even in Indonesia, which he describes as having maybe the strongest national identity of the group, he doesn’t draw any connection from this national identity to the genocide perpetrated by those who were forging it. I am not anti-nationalist, but I think a book developing these themes must connect them together. I noticed the disparity in a passage from the chapter on Meiji Japan (again, a chapter worth the price of the book by itself). Diamond points out the paradox in Japan’s successful military expansion under the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and their blundering, unsuccessful military expansion starting in 1937 and continuing through World War II. How could the same nation make so many mistakes when they had proved so capable less than a century earlier? Diamond writes:

There are numerous reasons: the successful war against Russia, disillusionment with the Treaty of Versailles, the collapse of Japan’s export-led economic growth in 1929, and others. But one additional reason is especially relevant to this book: a difference between Meiji-Era Japan and the Japan of the 1930’s and 1940’s, in knowledge and capacity for honest self-appraisal on the part of Japanese leaders. In the Meiji Era many Japanese, including leaders of Japan’s armed forces, had made visits abroad. They thereby obtained detailed first-hand knowledge of China, the U.S., Germany, and Russia and their armies and navies. They could make an honest appraisal of Japan’s strength compared to the strengths of those other countries. Then, Japan attacked only when it could be confident of success. In contrast, in the 1930’s the Japanese army on the Asian mainland was commanded by young hothead officers who didn’t have experience abroad (unless in Nazi Germany), and who didn’t obey orders from experienced Japanese leaders in Tokyo. Those young hotheads didn’t know first-hand the industrial and military strength of the U.S. and of Japan’s other prospective opponents. They didn’t understand American psychology, and they considered the U.S. a nation of shopkeepers who wouldn’t fight.
There is nothing wrong with this assessment. Diamond is right about the reasons he lists at the beginning of the passage. I think he leans a little bit too heavily on the “young hotheads” argument, but there is an underlying cause that he is missing. Why had Japanese leaders closed themselves off and not been overseas except for Nazi Germany? Why did they suddenly lack the capacity for “honest self appraisal”? Why did they abandon the strategy of attacking “only when it could be confident of success”? In short, I and a lot of other historians blame the excesses of nationalism. This is connected to the abuses of Koreans and Chinese that Diamond mentions elsewhere in the book, and the connection between nationalism and imperialism is clear, especially in Japan’s case. Japan’s brand of nationalism specifically, which caught fire during the Meiji Restoration, was about intense devotion to the state. This directly led to some of the bad decisions in 1937 and especially in 1945, when intense devotion to the cause of Japanese imperialism caused Japanese leaders to abandon all reason and jump into a war with Britain, Australia, the Soviet Union, China, Korea, and the United States with no hope of defeating all of them at once. This brand of nationalism was also connected to their “no surrender” policy that culminated in the American decision to drop two atomic bombs in order to avoid a costly but almost certainly successful invasion of the Japanese mainland. (By the way, most belligerent nations would have surrendered after the firebombing of Tokyo or at least after one atomic bomb. But not Japan.) This is even more effectively observed in Hiroo Onoda, a 2nd lieutenant in the Japanese army who continued fighting in the Philippines for almost 30 years until finally emerging from the jungle in 1974. He thought the war was still going the entire time. For more on this story and its connection with the Japanese psyche in the years leading up to and during World War II, I highly recommend the most recent couple of episodes of the podcast Hardcore History (already 8 hours on the subject with more to come) named “Supernova in the East”. Dan Carlin, the host, makes the point I am making here, that Japanese nationalism cannot be divorced from the bad decisions of the 1930s and 40s. Diamond never sways into criticism of nationalism, on the other hand, and I think it was a big miss. Nevertheless, it did not detract from my enjoyment of the Meiji Restoration chapter.

If I had to make a prediction, I think Jared Diamond’s Upheaval will be a hit. It might not get as massive a reception as Guns, Germs, and Steel, but it is so well-written and approachable that it is bound to spread by word of mouth. He has also chosen some fascinating moments from modern history that anyone not well-versed in world history probably hasn’t heard of. Even those like me who teach world history probably still haven’t read about these events deeply. But they deserve discussion and analysis, and Diamond provides that. Whether you know someone in Finland or Indonesia, Chile or Australia, Germany or Japan, or whether you just want to know more about how nations cope with crisis, this book is for you. It releases everywhere May 7th.

I received this book as an eARC courtesy of Little, Brown and Company and NetGalley, but my opinions are my own.

In an effort to help the reader to be more aware of (mostly negative) impending changes to our planet in the coming decades, Diamond presents several examples from history that illustrate how various countries responded to crises (both internal and external) and carefully lays out what we can mine from these events.

Comparing these trials to a list of factors at the end of each chapter, there's ample opportunity to sum up what you've just been introduced to, and another round in the epilogue to tie it all together. As you'd hope from the author, it resists being an admirable-but-knotted mess of useful info you'd have to just about convert to PDF to better organize.

He'll help you realize that it's not such a grand idea to issue judgment on a country for what they've done, as there are two sides to every story, right? The exposure of the foolish pride of several countries (yep, including the U.S.) and how these qualities point toward certain disaster (though not without the occasional benefit).

You'll hear about Finland, Germany, Indonesia, Chile, Japan (2 times!), and more. Each chapter is enlightening in its own way, sometimes compelling an audible "whoa"; other times, a chill down the spine, as some of these turnouts aren't too pretty, and match up with current governmental trajectories to a closer degree than is comfortable.

I think it's a more informal book than COLLAPSE or GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL, but that's not a problem--it's just a slightly different flavor. I still came out on the other side of this feeling better informed, more in tune with history and the world, and ready to keep on learnin'.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Little, Brown and Company for the advance read.

Starting with an analogy to individual crisis, Diamond argues that 12 factors determine how a nation responds to a crisis (mostly successfully; even the authoritarian coups he covers have their good sides, he thinks, especially since it’s unknowable whether you could’ve gotten the good—market-based economic reforms—without the bad, which does not seem like a reason to read history). The book did not cohere very well, but if you want capsule histories of big events in Chile, Japan, Indonesia, Finland, Germany, and Australia, and an overview of global warming and other challenges facing the US/the world, then I guess you could read this.

I've been having trouble with acsm files freezing. I really wanted to finish this but only made it about 1/4 through before problems. What I did read I loved and will be purchasing this in print. It was the quality of writing I expected and I think this book will be well reviewed and buzzed about around publish date.

Albert Einstein spent the last half of his life trying to fit the universe into one elegant formula. He did not succeed. Jared Diamond is trying to do the same with national political crises in Upheaval. He has developed a list of 12 factors that show up in times of crisis at the nation level. The degree to which the nation deals with those factors (if at all) determines how successful it will likely be in dealing with it.

The book exists at three levels: the individual, the nation and the world. The factors relating to their crises can be quite similar. The bulk of the book is on seven countries Diamond has had relationships with, having lived and/or worked in them. They are Indonesia, Japan, Germany, USA, Australia, Chile and Finland. They’re all different, and they all handled their crises differently. Some are still in crisis.

A crisis is a serious challenge that cannot be solved by existing methods of coping, Diamond says. The examples include foreign invasion, internal revolution, evolving past previous bad policy, externalizing problems, and denial of problems.

As for the US, Diamond sees it entering a crisis of identity and survival, riven by self-centered Americans who only care about themselves and today – right up to the top. Perspective, reflection and especially co-operation and compromise are absent from this crisis.

These are Diamond’s 12 factors for national crises:
1. National consensus that one’s nation is in crisis
2. Acceptance of national responsibility to do something
3. Building fence, to delineate the national problems needing to be solved
4. Getting material and financial help from other nations
5. Using other nations as models of how to solve the problems
6. National identity
7. Honest national self-appraisal
8. Historical experience of previous national crises
9. Dealing with national failure
10. Situation-specific national flexibility
11. National core values
12. Freedom from geopolitical constraints

The Chinese word weiji means crisis. It component characters are wei for danger and ji for opportunity. As in many clouds have silver linings. The example he gives first is Finland’s stunningly rapid industrialization when faced with $300M in war reparations after negotiating peace with the invading Soviet Union. Finland only had four million people at the time.

Things get dicier at the global level. Looking forward to potential crises like nuclear winter and climate change, Diamond’s model shows the nations of the world, and in particular the USA, are not set, ready or equipped to make the efforts the model stipulates to come out the other side of the crisis decently.

The structure of the book is standardized: a lot of history, some insight from personal relationships, and how the historical crisis fits the parameters Diamond set out. Mostly, it’s a lot of international history; interesting, and probably new to most readers. By far the best chapter is the epilogue, where he tackles the real issues: do national leaders make a difference in crises, and do nations need a crisis to act, or can they anticipate. The answers are sometimes to all the questions.

Diamond has created an interesting matrix for future study, but its application to the real world remains a question mark. It was a good exercise, but of indeterminate value.

David Wineberg

My only initial concern with "Upheaval" was that it would try and pass itself off as a fully-encompassing model that can successfully explain away how any nation can recover from national crisis. However, as it turns out those worries were all for naught. Right at the very start Jared Diamond makes it quite plain that his strategy of covering crisis and selective change through a collection of twelve factors is just a useful model . Again, not a catch-all , but merely a useful model that can successfully cover much of the past recoveries of several nations, and nations which whom were admittedly chosen for his exploratory study only because of his preexisting familiarity with them.

And the end result of Diamond taking the time to very clearly recognize his limits? An very enjoyably thought-provoking work. that provides a new lens in which to mull some of the factors that allow nations to pull themselves back from the brink.