Jared Diamond is an American polymath. Trained as a physiologist, he then turned to ornithology and ecology while in his spare time learning six languages – and the piano
 He apparently proposed to his wife after playing her Brahms's Intermezzo in A minor
 He then settled upon geography and is currently a professor in that subject at the University of California, but he has never let disciplinary restrictions constrain him
 Diamond is famous for applying insights from disciplines not normally noticed by historians to the task of understanding human societies
 He is best known for his 1997 bestseller Guns, Germs and Steel, which tries to explain the primacy of Eurasian and North American civilisation through environmental causes rather than in terms of the specific genetic or intellectual qualities of those living in "advanced" societies
 It paved the way for other macro-histories, notably Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens and Homo Deus
 READ MORE: * Book review: Cari Mora by Thomas Harris * Book review: Hits and Misses * Book reviews: Book of Cohen and A Dream of Italy Diamond's new book, Upheaval, asks how societies can recover from crises
 Hints towards an answer can be derived, so he believes, by analogy with the sort of "crisis therapy" that individuals are given after trauma
 He identifies 12 steps to this therapy . These, he argues, are similar to what is needed to resolve national crises
   Diamond's most successful paradigm for a country which resolved a crisis by honest self-appraisal, accepting responsibility, patience, flexibility and so on is that of postwar Germany, when it began to acknowledge responsibility for Nazi crimes and orientated herself firmly into Europe to allay fears of revanchism
  Upheaval concludes with lessons for the United States, even though it is not, in Diamond's view, in crisis
 America, he believes, has the priceless advantage of being an immigrant nation. Diamond, whose grandparents immigrated to America in 1890 and 1904, is not lacking in these qualities himself
 But America is in danger, he believes, more than any other democracy, from the breakdown of compromise, not only in politics, but in other areas too – even among academics
 Diamond himself has "repeatedly been sued, threatened with lawsuits, and verbally abused by scholars"
 His lecture hosts have been forced to hire bodyguards to shield him from critics, while one scholar concluded a published review of one of his earlier books with the injunction: "Shut up"
 These dispiriting phenomena, of course, are not completely absent in the UK either
 Upheaval is an easy book to criticise, and the shop stewards of the historical profession have not been slow in doing so
 They regard it as too broad-brush, anecdotal and slapdash in its approach. That, perhaps, is the fate of all pioneering work
 But it probes large and important questions. Diamond regards it as but a prelude to the real work that needs to be done
 It is, in his view, merely "a narrative exploration, which I hope will stimulate quantitative testing"
 Diamond is a strong believer in the quantitative approach – he claims with pride to have studied statistically deforestation in 73 Polynesian islands – but he does not make clear how such number-crunching could help resolve the very complex historical issues that he seeks here to explain
 In history, by contrast with science, the ceteris are never paribus. Nevertheless, Upheaval is bold, wide-ranging and original
 Unlike most social scientists, Diamond can write invigorating prose that carries the reader along with its sweep
 ("No science writer has ever won the Nobel Prize for Literature," the American historian of science, Michael Shermer, has declared
 "Jared Diamond should be the first.") Upheaval's errors are fertile, and force the reader to think about history in a new way
 It provokes even where it does not wholly convince, and deserves to be widely read and pondered
  
