Word: diamonde
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Most people would leave questions like those as rhetorical and quietly tiptoe away, but Jared Diamond asks and relentlessly answers them in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Viking; 575 pages). Diamond, a professor of geography (surely an endangered species itself) at the University of California, Los Angeles, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for the best-selling Guns, Germs, and Steel, his attempt to understand how Western nations rose to political and technological pre-eminence (the title gives you a pretty good hint). In Collapse, he's a little like the title character in Dr. Seuss...
Easter Island is one of the most isolated patches of land in the world, 2,300 miles off the coast of Chile, a civilization in a bottle. Diamond uses archaeological data to meticulously piece together its decline. Despite its current denuded state, it turns out that Easter Island was at one time home to the largest species of palm tree in the world. It seems the Easter Islanders overtaxed their tiny home's unusually fragile ecosystem. Once they chopped down all the palms, they couldn't make canoes to go fishing in, and soil erosion devastated any attempts at agriculture...
...Diamond is not an eloquent writer, but he doesn't have to be: Collapse is full of spectacles of unbearable, nightmarish poignance. He shows us the last desperate Norsemen rioting and eating newborn calves and even their own hunting dogs. He lays out the decline of the Mayan empire, the extinction of the Anasazi--whose five-story buildings were the tallest in North America until the 1880s--and the final days of Mangareva, a tiny tropical island where the last inhabitants not only ate one another but dug up buried corpses and ate them...
...they're being used to slice food as well. Knives, vegetable peelers and mandolines with ceramic blades are the new must-haves in the trendiest kitchens. Kyocera of Japan and Boker of Germany make the ghostly white blades with zirconium oxide, which is second in hardness only to diamond. They stay sharp 10 times as long as steel and don't react with food or affect its smell or taste. They are also lightweight, making repetitive chopping less of a strain. The hardness of the blades makes them less flexible, however, so they aren't so hot for cutting that...
...owned telephone companies, sending them to work for former competitors. Corporate corruption is commonplace?police have confirmed criminal investigations at eight listed companies so far this year, according to the Shanghai Securities Daily. The newspaper has reported that executives under investigation include the chairman of Shanghai-listed jewelry seller Diamond Co., who vanished after allegedly transferring $10 million in company funds to private overseas bank accounts...