Wright was preaching to the converted, in my case, when he makes the case for getting a grip and living within our means before we exhaust the carrying capacity of mother Earth. I enjoyed reading his book, A Short History of Progress, all the same, despite the scary moments when you want to tear your hair and yell, "No, no, I don't want to be living in the last century of progress!" and then despair because it looks like the only way to prevent it is to get all the greedy guys in control of the goodies to stop panicing about hoarding up even more of their unfair share of the spoils and start thinking about the future, instead.
But I've been depressed about the fact many of the most powerful people on the Earth are certifiable maniacs ever since it was brought to my attention, as a young adult, that world leaders were seriously considering destroying all life on Earth if necessary, just to decide who was right about how life ought to be lived on Earth. Go figure. No child of the cold war can be shocked by the notion that the rich and powerful might have the emotional maturity of juvenile delinquents armed with machine guns in a crowded school yard.
If there was a sour note, for me, in the pleasure of finding a book that gets a vital message out there as effectively as A Short History of Progress, it was hearing through the grapevine that the author, Ronald Wright, is disparaging about Jared Diamond's masterpiece, Guns, Germs, and Steel. I don't find the two of them at all incompatible. Wright stresses the boom and bust inevitabilities of those who consume without reference to sustainability. Diamond answers the question of why some areas of the Earth did better than others in the race for dominance, presuming all human beings had an equal innate potential to win the development sweep stakes.
Perhaps the friction, if there is any (a quick website failed to find anything I could use to deny or confirm the rumor), stems from the familiar if often unfortunate rivalry arising from different disciplinary perspectives. Jared Diamond is a scientist. Wright comes to his conclusions from the humanities and social sciences end of things.
Personally I feel that there is plenty in "Guns, Germs, and Steel" to support and reinforce the idea that it is high time for man to know himself, as Wright concludes in A Short History, as "an Ice Age hunter only half-evolved towards intelligent; clever but seldom wise."
What I loved about A Rum Affair was the integrity of Raven, the amateur botanist, who turned sleuth to prove the botanical fraud. One might have a giggle, in this cynical world of ours, about such a fuss being made over whether a particular plant grew in a particular spot, but it does matter, damn it! It mattered to Raven, who was by far the better botanist than the glory seeking professor who fudged results to pump up his reputation.