Do Leaders Matter — History by Jared Diamond

 

Jared Diamond’s books on history and anthropology have interested and entertained me in the past, especially Guns, Germs, and Steel,published 1997.

Diamond’s most recent book, Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings, covers various impressive endeavors by individuals who enjoyed business success, sports greatness, political leadership, and religious charisma. His approach: “my focus is … on the opportunity, rather than on the particular person who seized the opportunity.” As in his earlier books, he engages you, the reader, with his own fascination with leaders you may never have heard of such as the African leader Botswana’s Seretse Khama, and a bit about leaders you have definitely heard of like Hitler.

The wrap-up is that “the political arena has offered us many opportunities to explore fundamental questions about leadership in vitally important contexts: did one person make a difference as a leader? Was that one person the only one who could have made a difference, at that time and place?” (p. 108)

While he acknowledges the success of Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg, he suggests that the types of business they founded would have come along in another way if they hadn’t started theirs. In contrast, he profiles another example of successful business leadership that is more obscure: he writes about the Resnicks, a couple who invested their money in pomegranate juice — specifically who farmed pomegranate bushes and created the brand of pomegranate juice Pom Wonderful. (Aside: I admit that I tasted it a few times when it first appeared on the market, but did not find it at all habit forming: my breakfast juice is orange juice, but whatever.)

Diamond writes that only a few people could possibly have done what the Resnicks did:

“The chances that anyone among that small fraction also had lots of pomegranate bushes and lots of money were vanishingly low. That’s why no one had founded a pomegranate juice industry in the centuries before the Resnicks. They are unusual people in many respects, but they are unique in the long history of pomegranates. Just as Shakespeare was uniquely qualified among the several dozen significant Elizabethan playwrights to write Hamlet, the Resnicks were uniquely qualified among California’s several dozen significant pomegranate farmers to found a pomegranate juice industry.” (p 119)

Several other leaders from many eras of history are also profiled, in this interesting and readable history book, but I don’t want to try to summarize the following chapters. On the whole, I think I liked Diamond’s other books better than this one. 

Review © 2026 mae sander

Easter Island History

 

Mike Pitts’ history of Easter Island (Rapa Nui) and how it was understood 

and misunderstood was published January 27, 2026.

Island at the Edge of the World: The forgotten history of Easter Island primarily views the history of this very remote island in the Pacific Ocean through the history of one couple who spent several years there a little over a century ago. Katherine and Scoresby Routledge were well-known on the island, where they conducted a survey of the famous stone statues and collected oral histories from some of the older inhabitants of the island. Unfortunately, they only managed to publish a small part of their research. In the following decades a great deal of their material was effectively lost, and much misinformation obscured the actual facts about the native islanders and their accomplishments. 

This book is an effort to correct the errors that have accumulated. It’s interesting, though the author frequently offers more detail than an ordinary reader like me might want to absorb. In 1994, a popular film titled “Rapa Nui,” produced by Kevin Costner increased general awarenes of the island. In 2005, a popular book summarized the island’s history: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond. I think this book will contribute to the overall understanding of the island’s history. 

Photo advertising tourism to Easter Island.

Beginning in 1722, when the first European ship stopped at the island, the enormous sculptures by the seemingly primitive inhabitants fascinated voyagers, including the famous Captain Cook and many others. One historic fact that I found very sad is that early explorers noted a variety of birds on the island, but now there are far fewer species — or so says the author. 

In the British Museum

In the British Museum: an Easter Island statue (photographed from various angles).

Fascination with monumental sculptures from Easter Island has lasted for centuries! The sculpture in the above photos was brought to England on the ship HMS Topaze, in 1868. 

The Movie “Rapa Nui”

If you are intrigued by historic mysteries, you might enjoy Mike Pitts’ book. And though I haven’t seen the movie, I found a review written in 1994 by critic Roger Ebert, who wrote: 

“Rapa Nui” slips through the National Geographic Loophole. This is the Hollywood convention which teaches us that brown breasts are not as sinful as white ones, and so while it may be evil to gaze upon a blond Playboy centerfold and feel lust in our hearts, it is educational to watch Polynesian maidens frolicking topless in the surf. This isn’t sex; it’s geography. … 

Concern for my reputation prevents me from recommending this movie. I wish I had more nerve. I wish I could simply write, “Look, of course it’s one of the worst movies ever made. But it has hilarious dialogue, a weirdo action climax, a bizarre explanation for the faces of Easter Island, and dozens if not hundreds of wonderful bare breasts.” I am however a responsible film critic and must conclude that “Rapa Nui” is a bad film. If you want to see it anyway, of course, that’s strictly your concern. I think I may check it out again myself.

“The Invention of Prehistory”

 

Stefanos Geroulanos, in The Invention of Prehistory, has written a book about the history of an idea: the idea of prehistory. From his introduction:

“Like some religious stories, modern claims about prehistory can offer a soothing picture. Consider a primeval hominid on the savannah. It has just descended from trees and stood up. It might mate or craft tools, it might feel for others, hunt, paint on rocks, even build a sort of home. That creature speaks to us. It quenches our thirst for self-knowledge. Entire sciences have been built to tell us how ‘we’ came to be. Careers have been made, curricula drawn up, knowledge pushed forward, policies rewritten. Thinking about human origins has been one of the most generative intellectual endeavors in modern history.  

“It has also been one of the most ruinous. The Euromodern search for origins began in and then contributed to a long, brutal history of conquest and empire. It has been drunk on hierarchy. It is rooted in illusions—often murderous ones. It has served ferocious power. Its beautiful ideas have justified force against those deemed weak, different, ugly. It has rationalized colonial domination and eugenics. It has contributed to the destruction of Indigenous peoples. The sinister dimension of prehistory is easily disavowed and forgotten—after all, the archaeologists who dig up old bones and the biologists who study hominid genes are seldom the vectors of violence. But prehistory is, at its core, a device for creating meaning—for celebrating those who practice a particular idea of humanity and for demonizing those who don’t.” (p. 6) 

The intellectual history of the study of prehistory in Geroulanos’s telling is very interesting, involved, and full of famous names, which he mentions fast and furiously. Here are just a few of them as I highlighted them while reading the book: John Ruskin, T.H. Huxley, Napoleon, Charles Darwin, Marx & Engles, Pablo Picasso, H.Rider Haggard, Sigmund Freud, the far-Right Action Française journalist Léon Daudet, Walter Benjamin, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Alfred Döblin, Ruth Benedict, Claude Levi-Strauss, Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, William Blake, Nietzsche,  Virginia Woolf, Thor Heyerdahl, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, David Attenborough, W.E.B. Dubois, Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Derrida, Zora Neale Hurston, Steven Pinker, Jared Diamond, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Italo Calvino, … and others too.

The author describes the contribution and the influence of each of these thinkers and many others. He includes many quite fascinating illustrations (such as the one shown, a depiction of early man from a work dated 1838). He describes how political systems during the last several hundred years, including monarchy, fascism, democracy, and more have employed ideas about the origins of humanity to advance their agendas. 

It’s a very complicated and fast moving book: also bewildering and overwhelming because he has so much to say. Summarizing the book is in my view impossible, so I am now giving up any more effort to talk about it.

Review by mae sander © 2024