Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies | 
| Author: Jared M. Diamond
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Category: Book
List Price: $17.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1048 reviews
Sales Rank: 1533
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 480
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.4
ISBN: 0393317552
Dewey Decimal Number: 303.4
EAN: 9780393317558
ASIN: 0393317552
Publication Date: April 1, 1999
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Condition: Cover and pages are bent. Pages contain notes.
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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.
Book Description
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize. In this "artful, informative, and delightful" (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. Societies that had had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed religion --as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war --and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, the Rhone-Poulenc Prize, and the Commonwealth club of California's Gold Medal.
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| 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.
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