Death and Collapse

I devoured Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering, a book about death and mortuary practices during the US Civil War. It is very clearly written, and the topic fascinates me, and there was ample documentation to exploit. I really enjoyed it. After than, I had three books on the collapse of societies to read. The first was a bit of a light weight, Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, but it did have a discussion of how the Greenland settlements came to fail in the 1400's, a topic I've long been interested in. I also learned a great deal about other societies I never knew existed. It puts the environmental situation in perspective, I think. I am also interested in the topic because of how strategies may fail in complex situations. Last night, I fell asleep over Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies. This book, at least, is written by an anthropologist. Diamond is an ornithologist, not exactly the background for a discussion of a subject well beyond biology.