Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, New Edition
With a new chapter. The phenomenal bestseller—over 1.5 million copies sold—is now a major PBS special.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Guns, Germs, and Steel is a brilliant work answering the question of why the peoples of certain continents succeeded in invading other continents and conquering or displacing their peoples. This edition includes a new chapter on Japan and all-new illustrations drawn from the television series.
Until around 11,000 BC, all peoples were still Stone Age hunter/gatherers. At that point, a great divide occurred in the rates that human societies evolved. In Eurasia, parts of the Americas, and Africa, farming became the prevailing mode of existence when indigenous wild plants and animals were domesticated by prehistoric planters and herders. As Jared Diamond vividly reveals, the very people who gained a head start in producing food would collide with preliterate cultures, shaping the modern world through conquest, displacement, and genocide.
The paths that lead from scattered centers of food to broad bands of settlement had a great deal to do with climate and geography. But how did differences in societies arise? Why weren't native Australians, Americans, or Africans the ones to colonize Europe? Diamond dismantles pernicious racial theories tracing societal differences to biological differences.
He assembles convincing evidence linking germs to domestication of animals, germs that Eurasians then spread in epidemic proportions in their voyages of discovery. In its sweep, Guns, Germs and Steel encompasses the rise of agriculture, technology, writing, government, and religion, providing a unifying theory of human history as intriguing as the histories of dinosaurs and glaciers. 32 illustrations.
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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- ISBN: 9780393061314
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1056 Reviews
| 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 11, 2008 Type: User Review |
Marxist View on History
Although this book does contain a decent number of interesting historical accounts, the interpretation as to the cause of this events is eerily similar to the Marxist view. That is, availability of resources, not ideas, drives history and shapes...
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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 |
| From: Amazon Posted: Apr 12, 2008 Type: User Review |
A long but also highly educational read!
This is a must read for those who are interested in both history and the future of humankind!
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5.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: Apr 10, 2008 Type: User Review |
Interesting but Lacking
It is remarkable and disappointing that Diamond's attempt to discover reasons for industrialization and technological development in certain cultures skirts the history of MONEY.
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 3.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: Apr 10, 2008 Type: User Review |
Why Didn't the Incas Invade Spain?
The Aborigines of Australia built mankind's first known watercraft 40,000 plus years ago, yet today they are the most primitive stone age people of any continent. Why is that?
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5.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: Apr 07, 2008 Type: User Review |
An entertaining, informative journey through human history
Ever wonder how the Europeans managed to conquor the Americas, and not the other way around? Well, if you're unfortunate enough to have that much time on your hands, there's now a book tailor-made for you! Jared Diamond details how some...
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4.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: Apr 01, 2008 Type: User Review |
Must read for anyone interested in human history
This book is a must read for anyone interested in human history. The ideas in the book are innovative and thought provoking -- a look at human history that gives new perspective. Also very important is the suggestion in the Epilogue that a...
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5.00/5 |
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