Read Upheaval Turning Points for Nations in Crisis Audible Audio Edition Jared Diamond Henry Strozier Recorded Books Books

Download As PDF : Upheaval Turning Points for Nations in Crisis Audible Audio Edition Jared Diamond Henry Strozier Recorded Books Books

A brilliant new theory of how and why some nations recover from trauma and others don't, by the author of the landmark best sellers Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse. 

In his earlier best sellers Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, Jared Diamond transformed our understanding of what makes civilizations rise and fall. Now, in the final audiobook in this monumental trilogy, he reveals how successful nations recover from crisis through selective change - a coping mechanism more commonly associated with personal trauma. 

In a dazzling comparative study, Diamond shows us how seven countries have survived defining upheavals in the recent past - from US Commodore Perry's arrival in Japan to the Soviet invasion of Finland to Pinochet's regime in Chile - through a process of painful self-appraisal and adaptation, and he identifies patterns in the way that these distinct nations recovered from calamity. Looking ahead to the future, he investigates whether the US and the world are squandering their natural advantages on a path toward political conflict and decline. Or can we still learn from the lessons of the past? 

Adding a psychological dimension to the awe-inspiring grasp of history, geography, economics, and anthropology that marks all Diamond's work, Upheaval reveals how both nations and individuals can become more resilient. The result is an audiobook that is epic, urgent, and groundbreaking.

Read Upheaval Turning Points for Nations in Crisis Audible Audio Edition Jared Diamond Henry Strozier Recorded Books Books

"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.

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

Product details Audible Audiobook Listening Length 18 hours and 44 minutes Program Type Audiobook Version Unabridged Publisher Recorded Books Audible.com Release Date May 7, 2019 Language English, English ASIN B07PHH753Y

Tags : Upheaval Turning Points for Nations in Crisis (Audible Audio Edition) Jared Diamond, Henry Strozier, Recorded Books Books, ,Jared Diamond, Henry Strozier, Recorded Books,Upheaval Turning Points for Nations in Crisis,Recorded Books,B07PHH753Y

Upheaval Turning Points for Nations in Crisis Audible Audio Edition Jared Diamond Henry Strozier Recorded Books Books Reviews :

Upheaval Turning Points for Nations in Crisis Audible Audio Edition Jared Diamond Henry Strozier Recorded Books Books Reviews

• Jared Diamond, famous for “Guns, Germs, and Steel” and its environmental analysis of civilizational rise, and his later book “Collapse,” here offers a personalized take on the civilizational stage between rise and collapse crisis. For the most part, this book is a mixed success. It offers too much about Jared Diamond, and too much about politics, and too little about actual civilizations (although at least the author avoids mentioning current politics, to his credit). Still, it offers an interesting framework.
  
  The organizing trope of this book is to compare civilizational crisis to personal crisis, complete with using “outcome predictors” used to analyze the latter to analyze the former. In the same way we must often change ourselves, Diamond says, so must nations. This dialectic results in a blending of old and new, if it works and is done right, and allows nations to deal with changed circumstances. And nations it is—Diamond is not interested in theories that suggest the disappearance of the nation state, and while he’s no conservative, he’s not interested in radical pro-immigration politics, identity politics, intersectionality, or any of such modern political ideologies.
  
  In this way Diamond examines a wide range of historical crisis, including the Russo-Finnish War (the “Winter War”), the forcible opening of Japan by the West, Chile’s 1973 wars, post-1945 Germany, and Australia from its colonial origins to the present day. He is at pains to describe all the languages and personal experiences he has had in most of these countries. In all of them, he discusses the crises they had, their commonalities and differences, and how they were resolved—which they were, since all of these countries have had successful arcs, to a greater or lesser degree, since the crises discussed.
  
  Then Diamond turns to current crises, taking in turn Japan (economy and demographics); the United States (polarization and inequality); and the world as a whole (nuclear weapons, climate change, and again, inequality). He finishes with thoughts on the future, including interesting thoughts on the role of leaders. I’m not sure any of this is earthshattering, but, at a minimum, it’s a new way to look at crisis.
• 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 loose 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.
• 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.
  
  I received this book as an eARC courtesy of Little, Brown and Company and NetGalley, but my opinions are my own.