Almost all of this was as compellingly readable as my first Jared Diamon, Guns, Germs, and Steel. He explained the outline of the book in an elephant inside a snake kind of way (he used sheep instead, which you can't tell me wasn't deliberate), so of course I liked it immediately. The majority was about past societies collapsing or succeeding, which was history and geography and fascinating, but I confess that when he started talking about now I had to push myself, because he was pulling my fingers out of my ears and writing more loudly than I could chant lalalalala, and then the chapter about oil extraction was all money and corporations and my eyes glazed over until the final chapter.
One of the two usual plots of my anxiety dreams is Forgetting I Have Registered for This Class All Semester so will certainly fail it. The classes I have omitted to remember are either French or anthropology, that is, the two subjects I should have pursued more. I like Diamond's cross section of geography and anthropology; plus, he's a bird-watcher.