Book review: Upheaval by Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond is an American polymath. Trained as a physiologist, he then turned to ornithology and ecology while in his spare time learning six languages – and the piano. He apparently proposed to his wife after playing her Brahms's Intermezzo in A minor. He then settled upon geography and is currently a professor in that subject at the University of California, but he has never let disciplinary restrictions constrain him. Diamond is famous for applying insights from disciplines not normally noticed by historians to the task of understanding human societies. He is best known for his 1997 bestseller Guns, Germs and Steel, which tries to explain the primacy of Eurasian and North American civilisation through environmental causes rather than in terms of the specific genetic or intellectual qualities of those living in "advanced" societies. It paved the way for other macro-histories, notably Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens and Homo Deus. READ MORE: * Book review: Cari Mora by Thomas Harris * Book review: Hits and Misses * Book reviews: Book of Cohen and A Dream of Italy Diamond's new book, Upheaval, asks how societies can recover from crises. Hints towards an answer can be derived, so he believes, by analogy with the sort of "crisis therapy" that individuals are given after trauma. He identifies 12 steps to this therapy . These, he argues, are similar to what is needed to resolve national crises. Diamond's most successful paradigm for a country which resolved a crisis by honest self-appraisal, accepting responsibility, patience, flexibility and so on is that of postwar Germany, when it began to acknowledge responsibility for Nazi crimes and orientated herself firmly into Europe to allay fears of revanchism. Upheaval concludes with lessons for the United States, even though it is not, in Diamond's view, in crisis. America, he believes, has the priceless advantage of being an immigrant nation. Diamond, whose grandparents immigrated to America in 1890 and 1904, is not lacking in these qualities himself. But America is in danger, he believes, more than any other democracy, from the breakdown of compromise, not only in politics, but in other areas too – even among academics. Diamond himself has "repeatedly been sued, threatened with lawsuits, and verbally abused by scholars". His lecture hosts have been forced to hire bodyguards to shield him from critics, while one scholar concluded a published review of one of his earlier books with the injunction: "Shut up". These dispiriting phenomena, of course, are not completely absent in the UK either. Upheaval is an easy book to criticise, and the shop stewards of the historical profession have not been slow in doing so. They regard it as too broad-brush, anecdotal and slapdash in its approach. That, perhaps, is the fate of all pioneering work. But it probes large and important questions. Diamond regards it as but a prelude to the real work that needs to be done. It is, in his view, merely "a narrative exploratio