Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize. In this "artful, informative, and delightful" (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. Societies that had had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed religion --as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war --and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, the Rhone-Poulenc Prize, and the Commonwealth club of California's Gold Medal.
Explaining what William McNeill called The Rise of the West has become the central problem in the study of global history. In Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond presents the biologist's answer: geography, demography, and ecological happenstance. Diamond evenhandedly reviews human history on every continent since the Ice Age at a rate that emphasizes only the broadest movements of peoples and ideas. Yet his survey is binocular: one eye has the rather distant vision of the evolutionary biologist, while the other eye--and his heart--belongs to the people of New Guinea, where he has done field work for more than 30 years.
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1055 Reviews
| From: Amazon Posted: Jun 30, 2008 Type: User Review |
The foundation for understanding, not just history, but humanity.
I can't add much to the good reviews, but I wanted to suggest that if your child is taking history in school or shows an interest before that, please buy them this book.
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 5.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: Jun 23, 2008 Type: User Review |
An alternative viewpoint
Mr. Diamond must be admired for this epic work on humanity. Is it perfect, of course not, but what is perfect. He gives us a different way to view history and how geography has influnced it. I enjoyed the read and have assigned it to my students...
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 4.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: Jun 17, 2008 Type: User Review |
Pretentious But Shallow
G, G, & S is pretentious but shallow and illustrates the corruption of too much of American academia where political correctness masquerades as objective scholarship. It is as false as Lysenko's "biology." Diamond sets up a strawman,...
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 1.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: Jun 14, 2008 Type: User Review |
Excellent Explanation for Eurasian Historical Hegemony
Diamond's final analysis proves a good point. Many dominant countries today are not only in Europe and East Asia, but are also ones that have been largely repopulated by the descendants of those peoples, like the U.S., Brazil, Canada, Australia,...
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5.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: Jun 12, 2008 Type: User Review |
the big picture--from several angles
Pulling together research from a wide variety of fields, Diamond sets out to answer the question of why civilization as we know it developed and flourished in some parts of the world, while other areas were left behind.
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5.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: May 24, 2008 Type: User Review |
Geography, not genetics
A lot of reviewers have gone into detail about author Jared Diamond's arguments in Guns, Germs and Steel, so I won't repeat them. Essentially, he says that geography was a major factor, although not the only factor, in determining why some...
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5.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: May 20, 2008 Type: User Review |
If he could only teach just one history course in each college....
..it wouldn't be "one damn fact after the other," a comment on the study of history that Diamond references. His historical book is the antithesis of the "big man" version of history, so-and-so meets X, and says this and that, and decides Y. His...
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5.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: May 11, 2008 Type: User Review |
Panorama of History....................
Jared Diamond has written a comprehensive readable book describing some of the prominent reasons that societies have failed in the past and often succumbed to invaders. It seemed well written to me and although I thought the title a little...
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4.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: May 11, 2008 Type: User Review |
Marxist View on History
What drives history and shapes human civilizations? This book suggests that geographic and environmental factors are largely the driving forces. This is is direct contrast to human factors, such as widely held ideas embodied in a society's...
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1.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: May 08, 2008 Type: User Review |
Progress of Civilization
The problem with attributing human social development to externalities is that it glosses over the essential differences between all societies- that is how labor is socially organized and who decides how to allocate and use the social surplus....
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 2.00/5 |
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