The author needs to look at this in a wider context. GG&S may be defensible, but Collapse is pretty horrible, trying to force environmental explanations at the cost of downplaying European slave raids (Easter Islands) or utter absurdity (Diamond's suggestion that Viking Greenlanders preferred to starve than to eat fish). Diamond had a thesis and forced the facts to fit in the expense of integrity. After Collapse , it…
These books often seem to have a life cycle: sensation, canon, “but wait a minute,” and then lastly forgotten.
I figure the initial splash might mean the author just knows the right people in New York. They seem like the nonfiction equivalent of what someone I know once called a “tobadny” which stands for “trendy overhyped book about dysfunctional New Yorkers.” These are the occasional literary fiction sensations about… well… dysfunctional New Yorkers that arrive with gushing reviews in The New Yorker.
A merely very talented author outside the New York scene usually has to wait until they are dead to be noticed.
In our scene the equivalent would be an overhyped overfunded startup run by someone who knows the right people in the Valley that is the hot thing for five minutes. Meanwhile someone in Nebraska who invented a working Alcubierre Drive will never get funding.