We highly recommend

​A seminal story about the history of Humankind.  This book is a great narrative that builds up nicely. Puts all the pieces together  in a style that is easy to follow and fascinating to digest. ​It very succinctly summarizes mankind's collective journey from the birth of humanity, through successive 'quantum' leaps as fire, speech, art, agriculture, towns, class separation, religion, industrialization, science, social engineering and biological design transform us from hunter gatherers to mostly urban dwellers. It is highly readable, all while fostering deep reflection on the future of humanity.

​The book provides the best possible explanation for the ultimate causes of the fates of human societies throughout the human history. Anyone who wants to understand those causes should read this Jared Diamond's masterpiece. It turns out that guns, germs, and steel are more proximate causes of the fates. The ultimate causes, which are much more complicated and involves areas as geography and agriculture, are explained in details by the author throughout. Definitely, one of the best books we've ever read.

​Jared Diamond combines numerous fields in his exploration for why societies collapse. The chapters on the Greenland Norse and Hispaniola contrasting Haiti and Dominican Republic provide fascinating past and present examples for how environmental issues can drive societies to economic misery, decline and collapse. Diamond provides many other examples, including a discussion on Montana's environmental and social challenges to start the book.  Environmental challenges we face today are solvable and controllable by human populations. History provides us lessons we can apply to today's policies.  Great read if you're interested in environmental history and how environmental problems drive economic and political instability.

​Elizabeth Kolbert's book won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2015. It's hard to imagine a more deserving winner. Far from a dry scolding on the evils and perils of global warming, Kolbert's book is instead a rollicking, engaging travelogue, bringing together far-flung disparate threads into a cohesive whole. And that whole make abundantly clear that "one weedy species" -- what Kolbert calls this current extinction's "novel cause" -- is behind such pieces of art as the rapid destruction of the world's great coral reefs, ocean acidification and 10x-speed undoing of the last vestiges of the ice age.

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