Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond. Penguin, 2005.
What makes a society fail? Diamond looks at a variety of societies, current and past, to explore this, with a framework of several factors, but especially focusing most on ecological ones.
When discussing modern societies (e.g., Montana, New Guinea), Diamond is able to speak from personal experience and from interviews. He highlights how people build up a certain conception of their society, and how hard that makes change. He also discusses the effects of absentee owners, corporate influence, and more.
Diamond covers a variety of older societies too, in varying levels of detail, including Greenland, Easter Island, the Anasazi, and others. I found Greenland interesting because he was able to contrast the experience of the Norse Greenlanders and the Intuit, and Easter Island because he gives a plausible explanation for “the mystery.”
The writing draws on archaeology, biology, sociology, and more. By starting and ending with modern scenarios, it drew me in well: here’s where we are in Montana, here’s what happened to a variety of past societies, here are current issues. If you like a broad survey, that shows implications for today, you’ll like this book.