Collapse is about human societies' ability to recognize, engage with, and avoid catastrophic failure. The author focuses on resource and environmental failure in particular.

Diamond's previous, Pulitzer-winning book, Guns, Germs and Steel, debunked racial explanations for cultural success and is an important work of modern science. Diamond's books are strikingly original, carefully researched, and free of polemic. An antidote to the right's know-nothing corporate boosterism and denial, and the left's wishful thinking and anti-science, his ideas are criticized and lauded by both sides.

In Collapse, Diamond establishes five criteria to analyze historic and modern socities: environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, friendly trade partners (any of which can be significant) and a society's response to environmental problems (always significant). Diamond is a superb guide for his world tour, tracking the fates of Montana, Easter Island, Greenland (especially fascinating), New Guinea, Japan, the Anasazi and more, applying his five criteria to explain failure and success. Stories unfold of unappreciated innovation (prehistoric New Guinea's invention of silviculture), societal self-transformation (Japan has reforested over 70 percent of its islands), and brute force success (China's enforced family planning achieved an enviable 1.3 percent population growth).

It is also the most coldly sobering book on the environment ever written. China is a train wreck, environmentally speaking. Average blood lead levels exceed western limits for developmental impairment. There is only a small fraction of viable agricultural land left. The Chinese will have plowed under their largest wetland within a decade. And their seacoast fisheries are nearly gone from siltification and pesticide buildup. And there is little hope for change.

Every society has the natural resources it was dealt, as well as the natural weakness (poor soil, slow tree growth, inadequate water, etc.). Diamond demonstrates that similar societies meet different fates—or not—based on their willingness to adapt or their hubris in refusing to do so. All societies have in common, however, a certainty that they are doing enough. Diamond gives us the means to test that optimism.

Most of the original Grimm's fairy tales would never be allowed into the modern school library. They drip with gore, reek of barely concealed sexuality, and make their Disney descendants look as exciting as instant mashed potatoes. I was a fortunate child—my parents let us hear and read some of the less-censored versions—and despite the foreignness of enchantments and monarchies, I remember feeling that vivid zing that comes when you're exposed to art. No talking purple dinosaurs or any such guff—these were stories about children with big problems, solving them as best they could. Courage, honesty, and a kind heart prevailed.

Noted German scholar and Catskills resident Valerie Paradiz takes us back in time to the world of the Brothers Grimm, and makes an interesting observation: these were largely women's stories, passed from woman to woman. Male children undoubtedly listened to them, but given that women tended children and told them stories, it was the women of the community who safeguarded tales of magic, mystery, and morality and passed them on. And it was to women that the men of the Grimm family turned when they decided—in the honorable populist spirit of the German Romantic era—that the tales of the people were worth preserving for the ages. Left fatherless at an early age, the Grimm boys (who come across as rather friendly and affectionate) made the novel choice to listen to the women around them and thereby ended up creating themselves a place in history.

It was not an easy time to be female—or male, what with the Napoleonic wars and so on. Women, especially poorer ones, had the right to shutup and behave, and that was about it—a point those old tales drove home over and over.

Paradiz points this out without belaboring it, capturing many telling details about the period while neatly avoiding undue stridency. This is a book in which women forgotten by history are granted their moment in the sun, yet it steers clear of bitterness. This, Paradiz tells us, is how it was, and here's what happened. A serious, very readable work for anybody interested in the evolution of culture, family, and the human condition.

Remember the mute, oddly endearing extraterrestrial homeboy in Brother from Another Planet? Or the taciturn sheriff who, without any previous indication of mettle, stands up to the mining company's hired thugs in Matewan? Or the once-upon-a-primetime star of the soaps, embittered by the accident that left her a paraplegic, in Passion Fish?

You won't meet any of them in the short stories that comprise Dillinger in Hollywood, the first such collection in more than 25 years by the Oscar-nominated screenwriter and director John Sayles. But the characters you will encounter—a chatty pair of registered nurses en route to visit their husbands in the slammer; a spry janitor who used to be a famous bluesman; a possibly delusional ex-employee of the Fox movie lot who is languishing in a rest home—are every bit as indelible as those you remember from the author's films. What makes them so is not simply an assortment of tics and quirks—your standard-issue "colorful character"—but Sayles's fierce empathy for who they are and where they happen to find themselves, which is, more often than not, at the margins of society.

Sayles's people are working people. They shuck crawfish, fall off horses for the camera, and change bedpans in crowded wards. Sayles knows and understands the hard, necessary work that makes the world stay its wobbly course, and his affection and respect for the folks who do it is unfeigned. Add to this a pitch-perfect ear for the ways that labor, class, locale, and circumstance shape a person's speech, and a deadpan, sometimes surreal, sense of humor, and you've got a collection of character-driven stories that stick in the mind like overlapping bands of narrative Velcro.

Although Sayles writes in his introduction that "once in a while a story idea will come to me that seems best expressed in fiction...I feel it in words, not pictures," most of these stories do have a certain cinematic quality, especially in their quick, rhythmic snatches of dialogue and their ever-shifting, multifaceted mise-en-scènes. Then again, his films have always had a distinctly literary quality, which just goes to show that the work of neighbor Sayles (he's a brother from another hamlet, in Dutchess County) is all-of-a-piece. Whether he's looking through a lens or tickling a keyboard, this fella knows how to tell a story.

The most concise description of how the world reacted to Rwanda's blood-soaked 100 days can be found in Philip Gourevitch's account of the genocide, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: "As far as the political, military, and economic interests of the world's powers go, [Rwanda] might as well be Mars. In fact, Mars is probably of greater strategic concern. But Rwanda, unlike Mars, is populated by human beings, and when Rwanda had a genocide, the world's powers left Rwanda to it."

Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, author of Shake Hands with the Devil, was named the UN Force Commander for Rwanda in 1993. He was put in charge of the small multinational peacekeeping force sent in September to enforce the Arusha Peace Accords. The accords—signed by the Hutu-dominated government and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a Tutsi-led insurgent force—laid out the framework for a broad-based transitional government and an end to civil war. Before the accords could be implemented, however, a plane carrying the president of Rwanda, the Hutu moderate Juvenal Habyarimana, was shot down over the capital, Kigali on the night of April 6, 1994. The genocide had begun.

Dallaire attempted daily to persuade his superiors at the UN in New York to reinforce his tiny peacekeeping unit and authorize the use of deadly force to protect civilians. The authorization never came, and no reinforcements arrived—only explanations of what the UN force couldn't do. Dallaire and his UN troops were forced to sit on their hands as Rwanda became a charnel house; the limited rescue missions they ran—a few hundred here, a dozen there—pale in comparison to the scope of the killing. Shake Hands with Devil is at its best when bearing witness in this way, as Dallaire's impassioned eye-of-the-hurricane prose reads as if, between every line, he had scribbled in invisible ink: never again.

The book ends on an optimistic, if haunting note. Future peacekeeping missions with a clear mandate can be successful, Dallaire states, if the world can find the will. "After nearly a decade of reliving every detail of those days," Dallaire writes, "I am still certain that I could have stopped the madness had I been given the means."