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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1026 Reviews
| From: Amazon Posted: Jan 27, 2008 Type: User Review |
Great product
This product is a great book. It is everything I expected it to be and more.
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 4.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: Jan 23, 2008 Type: User Review |
Victim narratives around the globe get a handout
Jared Daimond's work on GG&S is anathema to conceptions of scholarship, truth or objectivity. Although his questions are very interesting and well worth asking, I find it incredulous that he could have spent 30 years forming preposterously overly...
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 1.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: Jan 22, 2008 Type: User Review |
Incomplete but worthy
Diamond proposes that geography is the ultimate cause for explaining why societies developed at different rates across different countries. The idea is not new, but Diamond's book is probably the only book of its kind to cover it in detail while...
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 5.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: Jan 22, 2008 Type: User Review |
Interesting but biased
The book deals with universal history using a new approach, and I think that Diamond does a very good job of dealing with the topic, making the book fun to read and providing food for the mind. Certainly, the books presents some important...
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 3.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: Jan 17, 2008 Type: User Review |
The head starts of geography, climate and latitude
Another book I wish I hadn't waited so long to read. The thesis, well-known at this point, is that it is not inherent biological or "racial" differences that account for variations in success during certain points in history, but rather the...
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5.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: Jan 14, 2008 Type: User Review |
Poor condition
I bought a new hard cover edition for my husband as a Christmas gift and the first pages of the book were torn. I was extremely disappointed as this was a gift, and was supposed to be brand new.
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 2.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: Jan 14, 2008 Type: User Review |
IS THIS THE KEY TO PEACE?
Stepping Off the Edge: Learning & Living Spiritual Practice
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5.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: Jan 13, 2008 Type: User Review |
If only everyone read this book!
This book was actually the text book for a world history paper i took at university. I enjoyed the book (and the course) immensely. I've seen that Jared Diamonds arguments have not found favour with all the reviewers and perhaps I'll have to give...
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5.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: Jan 12, 2008 Type: User Review |
Brilliant even when you disagree with the theses
4.5 stars
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4.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: Jan 12, 2008 Type: User Review |
Eurocentric bias. Uses old theories now proven wrong
It is hard to understand why this book won the pulitzer (though another reviewer points it out: only journalists give the awards -- not scientists, historians and others in relevant fields who could have pointed out flaws).
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1.00/5 |
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