It feels particularly pleasant when you enjoy an author you've never read. It's like meeting a new friend you can connect like you do with your best.

That's why the 60-ish bucks I spent on Jared Diamond's monumental Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive felt like a bargain. From Easter Island to China to Montana to Greenland, Diamond records the environmental characteristics of these places, outlines their brief histories and offers theories on their environmental catastrophe, whether in the past (for Easter Island, the Anazasi, etc.) or in the (quite scary) future (e.g. China, Haiti, Montana, etc.).

There are epic-like accounts of people like, for example, the Vikings and why some of them established long-lasting communities in places like Ireland but why others failed to stay very long in Greenland (one of the bizarre reasons was that the Viking simply refused to eat fish, something speculatively, but quite plausibly, attributed to a bad experience with seafood back in Scandinavia!).

The book also helps as an introduction to the modern histories of countries like the Dominican Republic and Haiti which are located on the same island(!) but  have widely diverging environmental situations (they were both corrupted but one of DR's early leaders established a legacy of protecting the country's forest - why? Maybe because one of his early guardians instilled a sensitivity towards nature when he was a child...)

The book's audacity and "magnitude" is a fruit of Diamond's experiences around the world. What I would give to step into his shoes for a while (grin). What does it feel like to spend more than two decades circling the globe, analysing environmental problems, diagnosing ancient societal collapses, knowing full well that your next book will be a best-seller (even if the first 50 pages - on Montana - are a little rough-going)? How do you become an expert on disciplines as diverse as geography and psychology?

Smack in the midst of spiritually cramming city life, amazing how a book on mother nature and how people have used and treated her throughout the centuries can help inspire and steady one's thinking. One thing about living in a reasonably urbanised, media-intoxicated place like Kuala Lumpur: there's not a lotta genuine direction. Too much media, hype, "big time" dreams, hedonism, pride/ego trips and absolute mind-loads of distraction.

People like Diamond and their personal journeys are, in this context, much-valued add-ons' to the day.