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Loading... Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997)by Jared Diamond
  
Favourite Books (69) » 29 more Unread books (26) Top Five Books of 2013 (506) Books Read in 2013 (86) Top Five Books of 2014 (1,048) Books Read in 2018 (3,482) Big tags (1) Falling for Science (44) Reading list (32) Allie's Wishlist (80) I Can't Finish This Book (112) Five star books (1,080) No current Talk conversations about this book. I love Jared Diamond, despite my review. Although the books was enlightening and interesting, once I read a few chapters, it became monotonous. (  ) GiGiGo | Feb 5, 2021 |  NA  pszolovits | Feb 3, 2021 | This book is really interesting. I was already familiar with a lot of the evolutionary and biological history and theory used in the book but I found the specific history of mankind and how it fit in with the biology very fascinating. Although this book is supposedly for the masses it can get pretty intense and almost tedious sometimes...you just gotta keep plowing through. (  ) mcsp | Jan 26, 2021 | The book sets out to answer a simple enough sounding question: why is it that Eurasian and North African societies were able to culturally take over the world while indigenous civilizations succumbed to them? It is easy to attribute the priors successes to the false assumption of superior intelligence or genetics. In fact, it is largely due to environmental differences which allowed these societies to profit of land which yielded more nutritious crop and allowed for herding animals: a prerequisite for societies to expand past hunter-gatherer tribes thereby allowing for greater technological advancements. The book tells many tales of pre-historic migrations, medieval conquests, and even first encounters with modern day indigenous tribes. ( ) hiwigiwi | Jan 8, 2021 | If someone told me this book is the manual Sid Meyer read to create the game rules for Civilization, I'd buy it. The author has a simple thesis: the differences between world's peoples comes from geography, and not from characteristics inherent to peoples themselves. The chapters contain arguments from archeology, biology, anthropology and even linguistics to support this thesis, as well as graphs, maps and diagrams that help visualize the information. ( ) ladyars | Jan 4, 2021 |
 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. Belongs to SeriesContainsHas the adaptationIs abridged inHas as a studyHas as a commentary on the text
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W.W. Norton2 editions of this book were published by W.W. Norton.
Editions: 0393317552, 0393061310
HighBridge AudioAn edition of this book was published by HighBridge Audio.
HighBridgeAn edition of this book was published by HighBridge.
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