Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies | 
| Author: Jared Diamond
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $14.91
You Save: $10.04 (40%)
New (33) Used (34) Collectible (6) from $12.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  1048 reviews
Sales Rank: 527
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 512
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.1
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.8
ISBN: 0393061310
Dewey Decimal Number: 303.4
EAN: 9780393061314
ASIN: 0393061310
Publication Date: July 11, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand new book. Over 3.5 million customers served. Order now. Selling books online since 1995. Order with confidence. Code: B20080515211443T
|
| Also Available In:
| • | Hardcover - Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies | | • | Paperback - Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies | | • | Hardcover - Guns, Germs & Steel: The Fates of Human Societies | | • | School & Library Binding - Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies | | • | Audio Cassette - Guns, Germs & Steel | | • | Audio Cassette - Guns, Germs, and Steel | | • | Audio CD - Guns, Germs and Steel | | • | Audio Cassette - Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies | | • | Audio Download - Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies |
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com
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.
Product Description
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.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 1043 more reviews...
Panorama of History.................... May 11, 2008
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 pretensious, the subject matter is good.
 Marxist View on History May 11, 2008
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 human civilization. Tragically, this is the essential thesis of this book and it is wrong.
 Progress of Civilization May 8, 2008
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. While geography tempers social development, it is the method of social production that is the overwhelming determinant of social success. Slave societies out produce hunter-gatherers. Feudal out-produces slave, and wage labor out produces slavery and feudal systems.
What is more more instructive is how current social relations restrict and hamper social development by wasting social production on useless activities like military ventures and individualized social decision-making. e.g. Individuals riding in cars instead of individuals sharing mass transportation, a more socially efficient transportation system.
 A long but also highly educational read! April 12, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a must read for those who are interested in both history and the future of humankind!
Why Didn't the Incas Invade Spain? April 10, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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?
Did the mother of invention arise from people living in harsh tropical/desert climates forced to invent in order to survive? Or did it arise in colder climates more readily because people were trapped in their warm home with nothing else to do but experiment? Was it both?
Most critics of this book sound to me like they have only read the summary on the back of the book. Their arguments are preconceived.
Even if you are one of those critics, read it. Disagree with it afterwards if you still want to, regardless I think it will add new perspective to human history for you. If you decide you want to write your own book based on how genetics and anthropometry shaped human history, by all means do so. I'd gladly read that too.
But don't just shrug if off before hearing him out. That's selfish cynicism and counterproductive to scientific understanding.
|
|
|
