In this podcast Knoxville News Sentinel editor Jack McElroy summarizes and comments on the book Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed, by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jared Diamond. (Recorded June 19, 2013)

"The subject matter of Jared Diamond’s Collapse is, in some ways, the opposite of his earlier Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs and Steel," McElroy says. "That book dealt with the development of human civilization. This more recent book looks at examples of societal collapse. Both works are ruthlessly analytical, and that makes Collapse especially thought-provoking, and frightening. As you read the book, it becomes all too clear that the factors confronted by people in such isolated societies as Easter Island or Pitcairn Island are the same basic issues we are now facing on our much larger but ultimately just-as-isolated planet."