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Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
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Guns, Germs and Steel

by Jared Diamond

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10,77014090 (4.16)219

Member recommendations

  1. IslandDave recommends Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors by Nicholas Wade
  2. bookcrushblog recommends Human Natures: Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect by Paul R. Ehrlich
  3. br77rino recommends Children of the Ice Age: How a Global Catastrophe Allowed Humans to Evolve by Steven M. Stanley, "Children of the Ice Age is an excellent anthropological discussion of the link that became homo sapiens. Guns, Germs, and Steel covers the more recent (see more) territory of racial evolution within homo sapiens."
  4. hohlwelt recommends Wild: An Elemental Journey by Jay Griffiths, "Complements very well with what Jared Diamond misses and vice versa."
  5. jhwmsls recommends Eden in the East: The Drowned Continent of Southeast Asia by Stephen Oppenheimer, "Diamond and Oppenheimer are diametrically opposed on several points (Diamond works with the linguist that Oppenheimer disagrees with), but I like the point (see more) by point defense Oppenheimer makes."
  6. jhwmsls recommends Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture by Marvin Harris, "Marvin Harris does not have the same "take" on history as Jared Diamond, but if you're interested in other viewpoints (and Harris, to me, makes some incredibly (see more) good points) try Harris' book (any of his, in fact)"
  7. rakerman recommends Stolen Continents: The "New World" Through Indian Eyes by Ronald Wright, "Also see Ronald Wright's Stolen Continents for another angle on the Americas."
  8. fyrefly98 recommends Ishmael: An adventure of the Mind and Spirit by Daniel Quinn, "Another perspective on the spread of our culture and civilization."
  9. infiniteletters recommends Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond
  10. MusicMom41 recommends From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life by Jacques Barzun, "Guns, Germs and Steel makes a great “prelude’ to Barzun’s book From Dawn to Decadence."

(see all 12 recommendations)

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Showing 1-5 of 133 (next | show all)
I'm very interested in history, ancient history, and anthropology, so this book naturally appealed to me. This book attempts to explain why people in Europe ended up colonizing and conquering most of the rest of the world. The simple answer is the title of the book, and Diamond attempts to explain why the Europeans had guns, germs and steel while other societies did not. His theory is that Europe and Asia had more natural resources, more domesticatible animals and plants, how those food sources allowed the formation of larger governments, armies, and so forth. He also explains how having access to other societies important for idea diffusion. These ideas can lead to technological inventions that can give a particular society an edge. In addition to explaining things in that manner, he also looks at Polynesian societies to explain why some were able to create larger governments.

I found the book very interesting, although he has the tendency to repeat himself. I understood his central argument the first time he wrote it; it was not necessary to reiterate it over and over again in each chapter. Some of his examples are weak, and his ideas are not without criticism from trained historians and anthropologists.

Still, interesting read and an interesting way to think about the domination of western civilization. ( )
2 vote stacyinthecity | Nov 16, 2009 |
A well-written exploration into the world's power struggles. ( )
  checkadawson | Nov 2, 2009 |
Great book! It presents history in a way that's not the typical white European way. It also argues how some society's were able to dominate others due to environmental inequalities. ( )
  Anagarika | Oct 30, 2009 |
Possibly the most interesting book I've read in the last 10 years. The author presents the idea that western culture (particularly Europeans, as opposed to indigenous Australians, Americans, Africans) are dominant in the World today only because they (the Europeans) originated in an area of the world that was rich in animal and plant recources (that could be utilized via domestication), and was geographically in an area where ideas like domestication, writing, town and city life and state building could be easily spread and picked up by neighbours of the region. ( )
  tabatha | Oct 22, 2009 |
Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel is a fine explication of the reasons why a few human populations have come to dominate more or less wholly the economic resources of the modern world, when, a few tens of millennia ago, there were few differences in material culture among the many roving bands of human hunter-gatherers. Somebody had to write this book, and its popularity says something quite complimentary about the reading public. But it has enough thoroughgoing problems to have made it difficult for me to enjoy it wholeheartedly.

Diamond does his best work when he focuses on answering fundamental questions: Why are certain species of plants and animals better candidates for domestication than others? Why were Old World germs so lethal to New World peoples, and not vice versa? Why did plant domestication spread so easily east and west from Mesopotamia, but with such difficulty north and south through Africa and the Americas? Diamond's answers are neither exhaustive nor immune from criticism, but the fact that plausible answers can be ventured at all is bound to pique the curiosity of many readers.

The book's most grating feature is its palpable political-correctness. Over and over, from its first page to its last, Diamond reminds us that the history of the earth has been determined by the ecological resources available to early humans at different locations, and not by biological differences between human populations. This position is, in point of fact, well-supported throughout. But Diamond's preachy earnestness on this point begins to feel accusatory rather early on, so much so that his objectivity feels compromised for most of the book. Perhaps he should have saved his moralizing for the epilogue, rather than allowing it to color his tone on every other page.

Diamond's examples are mostly tedious, and serve more to recapitulate his bulletpoints than to elucidate lingering complexities. The chapters on writing, technology, religion, and government (comprising about 100 pages) could probably have been culled entirely, or else included in a much-abridged form, because they collectively carried little weight in advancing Diamond's thesis. Finally, Diamond employs a needlessly turgid prose style. I would estimate that roughly two sentences per page of Guns, Germs, and Steel begin with the word "hence"; this happens occasionally in as many as three sentences per paragraph. These stylistic repetitions, coupled with Diamond's interminable recapitulations, make it very difficult to read more than one chapter in a sitting.

I'd recommend Guns, Germs, and Steel highly for its content. Its scope is broad and its depth is limited, which makes it accessible to even the most casual student of history and pre-history. But do expect to have to "power through" at some points, because Diamond's style and tone are more offputting than effective. This is by no means non-fiction writing at its best, but it is worth reading in any event.
1 vote polutropon | Oct 11, 2009 |
Showing 1-5 of 133 (next | show all)
In ''Guns, Germs, and Steel,'' an ambitious, highly important book, Jared Diamond asks: How did Pizarro come to be at Cajamarca capturing Atahualpa, instead of Atahualpa in Madrid capturing King Charles I? Why, indeed, did Europeans (and especially western Europeans) and Asians always triumph in their historical conquests of other populations? Why weren't Native Americans, Africans and aboriginal Australians instead the ones who enslaved or exterminated the Europeans?
 
Jared Diamond has written a book of remarkable scope: a history of the world in less than 500 pages which succeeds admirably, where so many others have failed, in analysing some of the basic workings of cultural process. . . It is willing to simplify and to generalize; and it does reach conclusions, about ultimate as well as proximate causes, that carry great conviction, and that have rarely, perhaps never, been stated so coherently or effectively before. For that reason, and with few reservations, this book may be welcomed as one of the most important and readable works on the human past published in recent years.
added by jlelliott | editNature, Colin Renfrew (Mar 27, 1997)
 
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To Esa, Kariniga, Omwai, Paran, Sauakari, Wiwor, and all my other New Guinea friends and teachers - masters of a difficult environment.
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This book attempts to provide a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years. (Preface to the Paperback Edition)
We all know that history has proceeded very differently for peoples from different parts of the globe. (Prologue to the Hardback Edition)
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Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0393061310, Hardcover)

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.

(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:55 -0400)

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