Robert Reads

This book review is doubly fun for me. I'm still trying to finish Diamond's Collapse, which I love, and the book review here is done by Malcolm Gladwell, whose The Tipping Point I had just read previously to Diamond's Collapse. What's great about this review is that Gladwell really gets what Diamond is up to and uses his review to basically slap contemporary thinking upside the head. This head slapping centers on a quote Gladwell pulls out of Diamond's Collapse, a quote that might be one of the key ideas of our age:

"The values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs over adversity."

gladwell dot com / The Vanishing