Pulitzer Prize-winning author to speak at WSU Vancouver

Washington State University Vancouver will host Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Jared Diamond, Nov. 17 at 6 p.m. in the Administration building, room 110.

Diamond will discuss, "Treatment of Older People by Traditional Societies: Lessons and Warnings for Us Today." Diamond's presentation is open to the public and admission is free. Parking is available at parking meters or in the Blue Daily Pay lot for $3.

Diamond says the treatment of the elderly is widely acknowledged as a disaster area of modern American society. Traditional solutions for the treatment of the elderly in small-scale, hunter-gatherer and farming societies has ranged from happier solutions than our own, such as old people who lived with family and remained useful, to much worse solutions than our own, such as abandonment or killing. Diamond says much of the variation can be understood from each society's economic roles and societal values. He seeks to discover what is useful to us from what we have learned about how traditional societies treated their elderly.

Diamond is a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. He wrote "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," and won a Pulitzer Prize for his book "Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies."

Diamond says he's set himself the small task of trying to explain the broad pattern of human history, on all the continents, for the last 13,000 years. He is fascinated by the study of why history took such different evolutionary courses for peoples of different continents.