A quick read, and thought provoking. Despite Diamond saying the seven countries discussed in the book are the ones he's most familiar with, the discussions of them are mostly superficial and not particularly useful. I was actually annoyed by the Chile discussion, where he wrote something to the effect of "no-one knows why Pinochet was so brutal" but a mere page or two earlier he quotes the frequent pre-coup graffiti "Yakarta Viene", indicating that the Chilean Junta & Pinochet were openly using Indonesia as an example of how to carry out anti-communist crackdowns. Later, in the discussion of the 1965 Indonesian killings, he seems to equate the killings of at least half a million people with whatever disasters would have been caused by Sukarno remaining in power and the communists not being all murdered. I felt that Diamond understated the Cold War influences (and the US influence in particular) on both 1965 Indonesia & 1973 Chile.