A well-written exploration into the world's power struggles. ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )

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.

Background Story: Big bang works it was to our solar system. Our solar system creates most significantly sun, earth, and moon. Sun's energy creates life on earth in oceans and across continents. Human life evolves. Humankind works its way out of Africa around the planet.

Diamond: Humankind capitalize on key domesticatable plants (wheat, rice, corn, potatoes, quinoa, ...) and animals (dogs, horses, cattle, camels, chickens, goats, pigs, llamas, ...) to develop culture, each with the resources locally at hand with neary by through trade. Eurasia, because of its geography, happens to get blessed with more domesticable resources, and thus accelerates development of human culture. Eurasia, particularly because of East-West orientation, further facilitates the flow of ideas and resources back and forth, and thus further accelerates development of human culture. Europe, specifically with it's jagged geographical composition, facilitates growth of sea-faring, competitive nation states and consequently accelerated European human cultural developments when compared to humans of geographies with fewer domesticable plants and animals, less ability to trade those plants and animals with other goods and ideas with others of similar temperate zones.

Summary: Human cultures are not disembodied from their natural environments in a dualistic, blank slate kind of way. Geography and climate drive biology; geography, climate, and biology drive culture. The winners may not be the winners because they're "better." It may be because they ate their Wheaties.

Bringing together multi-disciplinary elements of history, anthropology, agriculture, animal husbandry, exploration, epidemiology, and evolutionary biology, Diamond presents a case for the underappreciated significance of geology in the development of the human story, and the Western and American chapters in particular.

The implied underlying hypothesis is that in a certain stage of cultural development of the dominant land-based sapient species of a primarily water-covered planet, a stage after global diaspora and before recombining globalization, the culture of the jagged end of largest East-West-oriented land mass will most often emerge as the dominant culture of the species. ( )