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Title: Curious examples
Review: Mr. Diamond has sifted through several millenia of human history, and the most relevant cases he can come up with are . . . Easter Island? Greenland? The Anasazi tribe? Were there no examples of larger societies available? Presumably, the bulk of his readership will be Americans, but it is difficult to understand how a nation of nearly 300 million people is supposed to draw conclusions from cases of tiny, remote societies going adrift. Had he developed his theories from an examination of, say, the fall of Rome, or of the Mongol Empire, they may have been more compelling. Any attempt to extrapolate findings from communities of 5,000 to nations of 300 million is going to be flawed.
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