In the early 1980s, Charlie Wilson is best known as a womanizing US congressional representative from Texas. He seemed to be in the minor leagues, except for the fact that he is a member of two major foreign policy and covert-ops committees. However, once Charlie is prodded by his major conservative supporter, Joanne Herring, Wilson learns about the plight of the people who are suffering from the effects of the brutal Soviet occupation of Afghanistan....

Immediately after Emperor Hirohito's World War II surrender, General MacArthur suddenly finds himself the de facto ruler of a foreign nation. He challenges his expert on Japanese culture, General Fellers to provide evidence in ten short days to decide if the Japanese Emperor, worshipped as a god by his people but accused of war crimes, should be punished or saved, as the fate of a nation waits.

What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates? Diamond weaves an all-encompassing global thesis through a series of historical-cultural narratives. Moving from the prehistoric Polynesian culture of Easter Island to the formerly flourishing Native American civilizations of the Anasazi and the Maya, the doomed medieval Viking colony on Greenland, and finally to the modern world,...