Diamond is a wonderfully likable and curious writer — as enthusiastic about public health policy as he is about baseball. But at almost every turn his book runs into the shortcomings of its own methodology ... Diamond is always a fun time, and over the decades his writing has shaped the popular history field in a way that must be considered a unique personal achievement rather than a historical-structural event. But other writers have considered leadership in greater depth and with a clearer sense of what they are trying to demonstrate ... [An] uneven joining of unjoinable dots.
Mr. Diamond’s book would have benefited from a breakdown of leadership into various traits—humility, arrogance, decisiveness—and a discussion of their bearing on success or failure. The author looks at such characteristics in his individual profiles, but he doesn’t report any studies that examine them across many cases, possibly because they don’t lend themselves to social-scientific measurement ... Mr. Diamond’s emphasis on common benchmarks for success—a country’s economic growth, a corporation’s profits—leaves unexplored the possibility that each unique leader might harbor his or her own criterion of achievement.
Diamond is not interested in what literary scholars think ... Indeed, he is not much interested in what scholars of history, or ethics, or business studies think either, because this is one of those books that pretends the subject is one nobody has thought rigorously about before ... Unreliable.
Debatable, certainly, but not dismissible — that is the pleasure of a Diamond book ... Deflatingly for the reader, Diamond announces at the start that he will pursue a middle path ... For all the flaws in the argument, there is still great pleasure in considering Diamond’s examples.
Admirably transdisciplinary ... While Diamond gets slightly bogged down in statistics here and there, his treatise is an interesting one, which finds room for everything from sports coaching to inbred royal families, and an account of Christianity’s success ... It’s also very entertaining.
