For Thailand, 'midway' is the better way | Bangkok Post: opinion

Over the years, among the books that I have strongly recommended are two written by Professor Jared Diamond _ Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or to Succeed. Both have been translated into Thai. For those who cannot spare the time to read these rather hefty books, brief excerpts can be found in the book entitled Kalapiwat.

Diamond has just published another book, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies. Although the stories told in this book may not be as weighty as those of the other two, the book is no less interesting.

Diamond has spent decades doing research in the traditional communities of New Guinea. Ten of the 39 communities covered in his latest book are understandably New Guinean. One of the other communities is the Amazonian Yanomamo, on which a noted anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon has just published another book, Noble Savages: My Life among Two Dangerous Tribes _ the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists.