book review of guns germs and steel

‘Guns, Germs, and Steel’

June 26, 1997 issue

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In response to:

History Upside Down from the May 15, 1997 issue

To the Editors :

After warmly praising my book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies as “artful, informative, and delightful” [ NYR , May 15], the distinguished historian William H. McNeill identifies two contrasting approaches to history: the traditional emphasis on autonomous cultural developments that he favors, versus my book’s emphasis on environmental factors. Without disputing the value of McNeill’s approach, I believe that our differences arise from the different historical scales that we consider. My focus is on trends over whole continents since the last Ice Age; his, on much smaller areas for shorter times.

History’s broadest pattern is its different unfolding on different continents over the last 13,000 years. In 11,000 BC, all societies everywhere were bands of preliterate hunter-gatherers with stone tools. By 1492 AD, that was still true in all of Australia, much of the Americas, and some of sub-Saharan Africa, but populous Eurasian societies already had state governments, writing, iron technology, and standing armies. Obviously, that is why Eurasians (especially Europeans) conquered peoples of other continents. Why did history unfold that way? Why didn’t Africans instead conquer Eurasia, bringing Native Americans as slaves?

That broadest pattern poses history’s biggest unsolved question, which historians scarcely discuss today. Even so-called world histories focus overwhelmingly on literate Eurasian states since 3000 BC. Yet the emergence of such societies in Eurasia was no accident. It had long antecedents with clear environmental causes. No hunter-gatherer society ever developed states, writing, metal technology, or standing armies. Those developments depended on food production (agriculture and herding), which arose independently in different parts of Eurasia by 8000 BC. The resulting dense populations, food storage, social stratification, and political centralization led in Eurasia to chiefdoms (5500 BC), metal tools (4000 BC), states (3700 BC), and writing (3200 BC). Agriculture’s rise was much slower in the Americas, such that writing, states, and so on did not appear until thousands of years after their Eurasian emergence. Multiplied over succeeding millenia, that huge head start let Eurasians eventually sail to and conquer peoples of other continents. Hence Guns, Germs, and Steel discusses the differences among continental environments responsible for Eurasia’s head start: especially the differences among plant and animal species suitable for domestication, and among continental areas, isolations, axes, and internal geographic barriers.

Mr. McNeill faults me for underemphasizing cultural autonomy—i.e., propagated cultural developments independent of environmental differences. Naturally, they are conspicuous in history over shorter times and smaller areas. But, over the hundreds of generations of post-Ice Age human history, and over a large continent’s thousands of societies, cultural differences become sifted to approach limits imposed by environmental constraints. How could cultural autonomy possibly explain the distinctive course of Aboriginal Australian history? Australia had hundreds of tribes, whose cultures diverged greatly. Some built villages with canals and intensive fish management, while others were nomads mastering the most unpredictable deserts on Earth. If any tribe had developed agriculture, armies, or metal tools, it would thereby have been able to conquer the rest of Australia. But none did.

Was that failure because of independent stultification of all those hundreds of autonomous cultural developments in Australia? Of course not. Instead, the responsible environmental factors are clear: Australia is the smallest, least productive, most isolated continent, with no domesticable wild animal species and almost no such plants. Qualitatively similar, though quantitatively milder, differences stamped the long-term, continent-wide differences in human societies among the other continents.

After noting my book’s unusual perspective, Mr. McNeill wonders whether “it is [instead] historians who err by approaching their subject upside-down, thanks to their myopic concentration on literate societies and the last 5,000 years of history.” I would answer: yes and no; it depends on the historical questions being asked. To understand the tragedy of World War II, you must understand the contrasting cultures of Germany, France, and other European countries in preceding decades. That is the traditional approach to history, and its value needs no defense. But if you instead wish to understand why Eurasian societies destroyed Native American societies, by developments leading after 13,000 years to guns, germs, and steel in Eurasia but not in the Americas, you must explore the differing biological and physical environments within which human cultures operated. Alas, the answers depend critically on biogeography, crop cytogenetics, microbial evolution, animal behavior, and other fields remote from historians’ training.

Historians’ failure to explain history’s broadest pattern leaves us with a huge moral gap. In the absence of convincing explanations, many (most?) people resort, consciously or unconsciously, to racist assumptions: the conquerors supposedly had superior IQ or culture. That prevalence of racist theories, as loathsome as they are unsupported, is the strongest reason for studying the long-term factors behind human history.

Jared Diamond Department of Physiology University of California at Los Angeles Los Angeles, California

William H McNeill replies:

Jared Diamond’s letter restates his argument more concisely than I managed to do in my review, but on the central issue of how important cultural autonomy may be in the long run as well as in shorter time perspectives I still disagree with him. How can he claim that “over the hundreds of generations of post-Ice Age human history, and over a large continent’s thousands of societies, cultural differences become sifted to approach limits imposed by environmental constraints”? Much more powerfully than any other species, we change the environment around us; and have done so ever since our ancestors began to control fire and to use tools. Learned behavior, channeled along innumerable different paths by divergent cultures, is what allows us to do so. Human beings do indeed often “approach limits imposed by environmental constraints” only to find a way to overcome and escape those constraints, as the history of technology repeatedly illustrates. I hasten to add that failures also figure largely in the historic record when environmental constraints disrupted human schemes and drastic depopulation and cultural collapse ensued.

Of course Eurasia had basic advantages over the other continents, simply because of its size and internal variability; nor do I doubt that Europeans took advantage of that fact, and of their borrowings from parts of Africa and Asia when they crossed the oceans and began colonizing and exploiting the rest of the earth. But I do deny that their culture was an automatic product of their environment “sifted” (by what mysterious hand of nature, pray tell?) across millennia to conform to “environmental constraints” as Diamond so strangely asserts.

Secondly, Diamond accuses historians of failing “to explain history’s broadest patterns.” I answer that some few historians are trying to do so, among them myself, and with more respect for natural history than Diamond has for the conscious level of human history. He wants simple answers to processes far more complex than he has patience to investigate. Brushing aside the autonomous capability of human culture to alter environments profoundly—and also irreversibly—is simply absurd.

June 26, 1997

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Guns, Germs and Steel – and a ploughman's lunch

O h, for more history written by biologists. The great thing about Guns, Germs and Steel is the detail: Jared Diamond starts with a proposition every good Guardian reader would wish to believe – that all humans are born with much the same abilities – and then proceeds to argue, through meticulous and logical steps, that the playing field of prehistory was anything but level.

The inequalities kicked off with the development of agriculture in one small part of the world, the so-called Fertile Crescent in what is now western Asia. Agriculture stimulates increasing population density, which means disease, which means acquired immunity. Civilisation requires the food surplus only agriculture can provide, but it also imposes a need for specialisation, for technology, for ingenuity. Competing civilisations (and they turned up soon enough in Europe and the Middle East) provoke an arms race.

So you start with stone tools and the raw materials for a Welsh rarebit and you end up with galleons, guns and measles, all of which helped 168 Spanish conquistadores in 1532 to overthrow an army of 80,000 Incas half way around the world.

But what was so special about the Fertile Crescent?

It had emmer and einkorn, species of grass with heavy seeds. Some individuals in these wild wheat ancestors had developed mutations that boded ill for their evolutionary survival. Instead of spilling their seed upon the ground, these doomed stalks kept their ears pricked, so to speak: their seed heads stayed neatly on the stem, long past ripening. This accident made them dish of the day for foraging nomads, and then ideal for the first, tentative plantations by the hunters and gatherers who so casually launched human civilisation some time after the end of the last ice age.

Pretty much the same mutation then occurred in certain wild pulses, which stayed in the pod, as a kind of packed lunch, rather than falling to the soil to multiply.

But it took more than one or two convenient plants that were ripe for the picking to get civilisation off the ground. The shuffling of the evolutionary pack dealt the hunter gatherers who happened to be living in eastern Turkey, the Levant and the valley of the Euphrates a whole suite of wild staples, all in that one huge curve of valley, hillside and floodplain: barley and lentils, olives, figs, sweet almonds, chickpeas, mustard and so on.

The seeds of wild wheat were not just big and easy to gather, they delivered the best nourishment. And not far away, contentedly chewing on a choice of the other wild grasses and pulses, were wild cattle, sheep and goats all suitable for domestication, and potentially docile swine as well.

So the groundbreaking farmers of the Fertile Crescent, with their makeshift mattocks, stone sickles and crude pestles and mortars, already had about them the makings of the first ploughman's lunch of bread and butter and cheese and beer; the first Mediterranean diet of wine, olive oil, peas and prosciutto; and everything for a beefburger except the tomatoes, ketchup and mayo.

Agricultural settlement also began independently in China and Mexico, because these places also had little packages of this and that – rice and soya, maize, beans and squash – from which to construct a cuisine and a culture.

Other places were not so fortunate. The entire continent of Africa produced a few scattered plants – coffee, millet, sorghum, groundnut and yams – but these species did not share the same climate so they could not all be grown in the same place. And not one large African mammal has ever been satisfactorily domesticated, even now. Meanwhile, the Fertile Crescent had four of them at the end of the last ice age, mooing and bleating and oinking for human attention.

And the same package of plants and animals that flourished in the Fertile Crescent could – with a bit of adjustment – do just as well on both sides of the Mediterranean, in the Alpine valleys, on the great European plain, and all the way to the Breton coast.

So the ploughman's lunch was not just a local meal: it could be exported from Nineveh to Nuneaton.

This is an exhilarating book. Not all the argument is quite as beautifully constructed as the passages that deal with plants and animals. Diamond's foray into human prehistory provoked the American Anthropological Association into devoting a whole session to examining the ideas he sets out in this book and more especially its sequel, Collapse.

The latter then became a scholarly Cambridge text which was reviewed in Science on 22 January . This particular issue of Science might have been edited with our club's choice in mind. The big feature focuses on evidence for permanent houses of stone, built by hunter-gatherers in the Fertile Crescent 14,500 years ago, long before the emergence of agriculture.

Another feature is devoted to the disappearance of Australia's giant marsupials , 40,000 years ago, around about the time the first bands of human hunters turned up. These extinctions – and similar megafaunal massacres happened in Eurasia too – left Australia and North America with no candidate creature for domestication, which is why the locals were better off with their old skills of hunting and gathering.

If I have a problem, it is with Diamond's prologue. On page 22 of Guns, Germs and Steel, he argues that people in New Guinea today who have never been exposed to passive televisual entertainment, and with every stimulus to think for themselves, might even be, because of their environment, mentally more able than Westerners. This seems to concede that some lineal groups can be innately "better" than others, which is the starting point for all racist claims.

Damn, can he have meant that? Surely it was to see off such thinking that prompted a club member to propose this book in the first place ?

Professor Stewart's Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities | Cover image

For March, something that really does add up. Ian Stewart has suggested that even his fellow scientists don't really appreciate the profound importance of mathematics . Professor Stewart recently delivered his own two-fisted mathematical punch with his Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities (2008) and Hoard of Mathematical Treasures (2009). Both are huge fun. Grab one and enjoy it. I'll look at both on Friday 19 March

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Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

Oh, East is East, and West is West,and never the twain shall meet,

Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat

But there is neither East nor West, Border,nor Breed, nor Birth

When two strong men stand face to face,though they come from the ends of the earth.

[Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Ballad of East and West’(1889)]

This book is inspired by just such a cross-cultural encounter as that between Kamal the border raider and the Colonel’s son of the Guides. In the first chapter the author recounts a conversation that he, a biologist studying bird evolution, had in New Guinea in 1972 with Yali, a local politician preparing his people for self-government, which culminated in the searching question ‘Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo [goods] and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own’ [p. 14]. ‘Yali’s question’ plays a central role in Professor Diamond’s enquiry into ‘a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years’, leading him into a wide-ranging discussion of the history of human evolution and diversity through a study of migration, socio-economic and cultural adaptation to environmental conditions, and technological diffusion. The result is an exciting and absorbing account of human history since the Pleistocene age, which culminates in a sketch of a future scientific basis for studying the history of humans that will command the same intellectual respect as current scientific studies of the history of other natural phenomena such as dinosaurs, nebulas and glaciers.

This is an ambitious project, and no reviewer can comment on all of it with equal authority. My own background as an historian of European expansion and Asian response over the last two hundred years requires me to take most of the account of prehistory on trust - which is a drawback since Diamond asserts that most of the really important influences on modern history had already occurred before the birth of Christ. To a non-specialist, the account of human prehistory presented here seems plausible and well-founded - the argument is that, as homo sapiens evolved in Africa and migrated to colonise first Asia, then Europe, then Australia, and finally the Americas, so a technical progression from hunting to settled agriculture, and a societal progression from warring bands to complex sedentary civilisations took place largely determined by the environmental conditions in which different branches of the same species found themselves. Where plants and animals could easily be domesticated, as in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, settled agriculture emerged first, and was then diffused to other suitable areas.

The development of surplus food-producing societies with high population densities provided humans with resistance to the diseases carried by their domesticated flocks, and facilitated other technological changes - especially the development of systems of specialised knowledge that led to advances in metallurgy, literacy and socio-economic organisation - primarily within the Eurasian supercontinent, and its outlying regions in the western Pacific and northern Africa, where the environment, and the geographical networks of migration, trade and communication, most favoured their spread. Diffusion is the key concept here - some continents and regions were more favourable than others, because of internal or external connections. As a result, when the scattered branches of the human species were reunited by trans-oceanic voyages and mercantile capitalism after 1500, Old World invaders had a decisive advantage over their New World cousins - the development of guns, germs and steel ensured that Europeans settled the Americas, Oceania and Southern Africa, eliminating or subduing local populations unable to resist them.

Professor Diamond’s main concern is to reject any simple racial explanation of the apparent differences in material culture between different regions of the planet. In particular, he argues that there is no essential difference in intelligence between races; indeed, those who are able to survive in harsh and dangerous environments, such as New Guinea, are likely to be more intelligent than those living a sheltered and sedentary existence in the United States, since mere survival requires much greater skills in the former than in the latter. Much of his evidence here is anecdotal - accounts of his own experiences with ‘primitive’ peoples, and their capacity to adapt to severe environments or respond successfully to new technologies. This seems an entirely appropriate starting point for a multi-cultural world, and one that is logical for an evolutionary biologist. No-one claims that the predatory activity of magpies that has diminished stocks of song-birds in British suburban gardens has occurred because magpies are cleverer than thrushes, but simply because they are better adapted to take advantage of changes in environmental circumstances. The photographic illustrations in the book - 32 plates of human faces drawn from different racial groups around the world - are intended to illustrate this point, although they bear a striking resemblance to the albums of ‘native types’ that used to grace the catalogues of colonial photographers as part of a very different discourse.

Given the magnitude of the task he has set himself, it is inevitable that Professor Diamond uses very broad brush-stokes to fill in his argument. This style is further exaggerated by his desire to identify ‘ultimate’ explanations rather than mere ‘proximate’ ones. Thus behind the proximate explanation of the dominance of Old World societies and technologies over the last two thousand years (guns, germs and steel) lurks an ultimate explanation - why bronze tools appeared early in parts of Eurasia, late and only locally in the New World, and never, before European settlement, in Australasia. One result is that many of the concerns of practising historians who are trying to grapple with part of the same agenda are given little attention. The spread of technology, and of the military conquests and economic changes that it has wrought over the past thousand years, is dismissed as largely a question of historical accident. For Diamond, technology is about inventiveness, and all peoples are equally inventive given the right circumstances. Even more compressed is the account of socio-political institutions on which many other analyses of the modern world depend. Here the entire history of political thought and state-formation from Aristotle onwards is covered in a couple of pages, most of which is devoted to hydraulic theories [pp. 282-4], while all societies more complex than an egalitarian tribe are dismissed as ‘kleptocracies’ that use control of literacy and organised religion to create legitimacy for self-serving elites that extract tribute to provide inefficient public services. [p. 276ff]. Remarkably, for a book on this subject, there is only one brief mention of capitalism [p. 250], where it is listed as one of ten plausible but incomplete explanations of technical progress in Europe. It is significant that ‘Yali’s question’ with which the book begins was ‘why is it that you white people developed so much cargo .. but we black people had little cargo of our own?’, not ‘why do the top ten per cent of white people have so much cargo, but the bottom ten per cent have so little?’, or ‘why is so much of the cargo in the world manufactured in the United States?’. A book seeking to answer such questions would have to add a fourth totem of Western progress to its title and be called, perhaps, Guns, Germs, Steel and Coca-Cola.

This approach distances Diamond’s analysis from much of the current literature on cultural interactions in modern history - indeed, his suggestions for further reading omit almost all of the standard literature on the history of imperialism and post-colonialism, world-systems, underdevelopment or socio-economic change over the last five hundred years. Thus the large debate that is currently going on over historical explanations of the wealth and poverty of nations in a global context is here reduced to a sub-set of the ultimate question about bronze tools and geographic connectedness - ‘technology may have developed most rapidly in regions with moderate connectedness [Europe], neither too high [China], nor too low [India]’ [p. 416]. For a sample of the wider debate, see the active correspondence about ‘Eurocentrism’ in the H-World list sparked off by Brad de Long’s review of David Landes’s forthcoming The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Are Some So Rich and Others So Poor? dated 28.3.98. While Diamond gives ‘cultural idiosyncrasies’ some role in explaining differential progress in material culture, and are singled out as an important factor in making history unpredictable (as in the account given of the Chinese decision in the early fifteenth century to ban merchant fleets as a result of court intrigue, which allegedly destroyed her medieval technological leadership in Eurasia), these are seen as simply accidents of history - on a par with the failure of the July Plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944. There may be societal variation in the level of receptiveness to innovation (as shown by different responses by non-European peoples to the arrival of European technologies in the nineteenth century), but this simply demonstrates that, on the grand scale, some societies on all continents would have had equal chances to achieve technological progress if their environments had been equally favourable [p. 411ff].

In contrast with the very compressed accounts of the socio-economic and political history of the settled world, Professor Diamond’s frequent recounting of his personal experiences in New Guinea bring his arguments into sharper focus. They also suggest irresistible comparisons with events nearer home. The intriguing account of the reaction of various tribes to contact with the modern world over the last fifty years provides a startling perspective on events in other isolated and unworldly communities, such as the History departments of British universities. We can all identify the Chimbu tribe, which responded to contact with the outside world within a single generation by growing coffee as a cash-crop, and establishing saw-mills and trucking companies to grow rich, and also their neighbours, the Daribi, who are described as ‘especially conservative and uninterested in new technology’, who have tried, unsuccessfully, to ignore all pressures to change and who are now being taken over by the Chimbu [252]. Best of all is the description of the Fayu, a tribe of about 400 hunter-gatherers that normally live as single family units, meeting only occasionally to arrange marriages. Such meetings are frightening events since murder and revenge-killings are a common occurrence that had led to the reduction of the tribe from over 2,000 to 400 within living memory. At a typical meeting,

one Fayu man spotted the man who had killed his father. The son raised his ax and rushed at the murderer but was wrestled to the ground by friends; then the murderer came to the prostrate son with an ax and was also wrestled down. Both men were held, screaming with rage, until they seemed sufficiently exhausted to be released. Other men periodically shouted insults at each other, shook with anger and frustration, and pounded the ground with their axes [266].

An exact description of the last meeting of the Faculty Resource Allocation Committee! Missionary intervention has since ‘saved’ the Fayu: what price the QAA?

A future historian coming across this book in a thousand years time would have no doubt that it was written by an American. The underlying vision of humanity as a salad-bowl made up of distinct and insoluble ethnic identities would provide a clue, and the stress on the arrival of Old World technologies and pathogens in the New World as the archetypal event of human diffusion and coalescence would confirm this. Yet, while the impact of Eurasian diseases (assisted by enslavement and severe degradation in living conditions) on the indigenous populations of the New World was a cataclysmic historical event, but it was not entirely without precedent elsewhere. The effect of plague, especially the Black Death of the fourteenth century, on Asian, European and North African peoples and societies was similar in some respects, as was the impact of smallpox and cholera in east and central Africa in the nineteenth century. More generally, the use of Eurasia as a meaningful geographical expression in historical terms is a hall-mark of a transatlantic focus (it is also prominent in the work of Alfred Crosby, for example). Such a viewpoint over-simplifies a large body of complex human experience, since much of the history of conquest, settlement and exploitation in the modern world is in fact concerned with what might be termed ‘Eurasian civil wars’ - from the Neolithic invasion of Europe, via the activities of Gengis Khan and his successors, to the fall of Constantinople, the arrival of European armed traders in the East in the sixteenth century, and full-blown European imperialism after 1750. The European empires of conquest in Asia, especially those of the British in India and the Dutch in Java, were not based on clear technological superiority in armaments, nor on the spread of disease, but they spawned a sense of ‘otherness’ and an attitude of cultural and racial superiority at least as intense as that aroused by colonisation in the New World. In Africa, too, European imperial troops (often of African or Indian origin) exploited only a limited and short-lived technical superiority in weaponry that lasted from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries.

Authors cannot be blamed for the publisher’s blurbs on their book-jackets, but it may be significant that this work is described there as a work of ‘popular science’, not as a work of history. Professor Diamond’s most contentious argument, by far, is his conclusion that the logical consistency and precision of current discoveries in archaeology and prehistory make it possible to foresee the future of human history as a science. There are a number of difficulties here. Any ‘science of human history’ is likely to be based on a search for laws, processes and explanations that are rooted in the agenda of the ‘new’, processualist archaeology that was pioneered by the work of Lewis Binford and others in the 1960s and 1970s. Such approaches have now been undermined by other theoretical approaches which deny the possibility of establishing general laws, stress the social, cultural and gendered nature of archaeological knowledge and explanation, and seek to uncover ‘the archaeology of the mind’ and the spirit. Diamond’s use of contemporary ethnographic observations of some peoples to provide explanations of the prehistoric past of all peoples can be questioned on methodological grounds, and his refusal to place the knowledge he uses in its historiographical context weakens the force of his arguments as historical explanations. There is another set of problems here, too. The history of humans cannot properly be equated with the history of dinosaurs, glaciers or nebulas, because these natural phenomena do not consciously create the evidence on which we try to understand them, nor can we detect a human consciousness in their actions. Most important of all, human history requires history to be studied on a human scale, so that we can empathise with the past, and see it in the context of our present humanity. Here there is nothing between the minute and the monumental - anecdotal accounts of random individuals at moments in their lives, and the huge sweep of whole peoples and continents across millennia.

These cavils are to be expected. Historians cannot allow scientists to tell them how to do their job; if they did, then history would vanish for ever into the intellectual establishment of rational positivism, and would lose its capacity - to which Professor Diamond is sensitive - to unite beliefs about the present with an understanding of the past in ways that can influence the future. Yet despite its inevitable minor flaws, this book remains a very impressive achievement of imagination and exposition, which tells us much about the interaction between ‘civilised’ minds and ‘primitive’ peoples at the end of the second millennium of the Christian era. To end, as we began, with a nineteenth-century perspective on such matters:

Though I’ve belted you and flayed you

By the livin’ Gawd that made you

You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!

[Rudyard Kipling, ‘Gunga Din’ (1894)]

The author regrets that he is unable to respond to the review or enter into any dialogue due to outstanding commitments.

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GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL

The fates of human societies.

by Jared Diamond ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 1997

The prose is not brilliant, and there are apologies and redundancies that we could do without. But a fair answer to Yali's...

MacArthur fellow and UCLA evolutionary biologist Diamond ( The Third Chimpanzee , 1992, etc.) takes as his theme no less than the rise of human civilizations.

On the whole this is an impressive achievement, with nods to the historians, anthropologists and others who have laid the groundwork. Diamond tells us that the impetus for the book came from a native New Guinea friend, Yali, who asked him, "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?'' The long and short of it, says Diamond, is biogeography. It just so happened that 13,000 years ago, with the ending of the last Ice Age, there was an area of the world better endowed with the flora and fauna that would lead to the take-off toward civilization: that valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers we now call the Fertile Crescent. There were found the wild stocks that became domesticated crops of wheat and barley. Flax was available for the development of cloth. There was an abundance of large mammals that could be domesticated: sheep, goats, cattle. Once agriculture is born and animals domesticated, a kind of positive feedback drives the growth toward civilization. People settle down; food surpluses can be stored so population grows. And with it comes a division of labor, the rise of an elite class, the codification of rules, and language. It happened, too, in China, and later in Mesoamerica. But the New World was not nearly as abundant in the good stuff. And like Africa, it is oriented North and South, resulting in different climates, which make the diffusion of agriculture and animals problematic. While you have heard many of these arguments before, Diamond has brought them together convincingly.

Pub Date: March 1, 1997

ISBN: 0-393-03891-2

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1997

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | GENERAL HISTORY

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

The osage murders and the birth of the fbi.

by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.

During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann ( The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession , 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.

Pub Date: April 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

GENERAL HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | UNITED STATES | FIRST/NATIVE NATIONS | HISTORY

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Brendan Fraser Joins Cast of ‘Flower Moon’ Film

BOOK TO SCREEN

Oct. 20 Release For 'Killers of the Flower Moon'

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

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'Collapse': How the World Ends

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By Gregg Easterbrook

Jan. 30, 2005

COLLAPSE How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. By Jared Diamond. Illustrated. 575 pp. Viking. $29.95.

EIGHT years ago Jared Diamond realized what is, for authors, increasingly a fantasy -- he published a serious, challenging and complex book that became a huge commercial success. "Guns, Germs, and Steel" won a Pulitzer Prize, then sold a million copies, astonishing for a 480-page volume of archeological speculation on how the world reached its present ordering of nations. Now he has written a sequel, "Collapse," which asks whether present nations can last. Taken together, "Guns, Germs, and Steel" and "Collapse" represent one of the most significant projects embarked upon by any intellectual of our generation. They are magnificent books: extraordinary in erudition and originality, compelling in their ability to relate the digitized pandemonium of the present to the hushed agrarian sunrises of the far past. I read both thinking what literature might be like if every author knew so much, wrote so clearly and formed arguments with such care. All of which makes the two books exasperating, because both come to conclusions that are probably wrong.

"Guns" asked why the West is atop the food chain of nations. Its conclusion, that Western success was a coincidence driven by good luck, has proven extremely influential in academia, as the view is quintessentially postmodern. Now "Collapse" posits that the Western way of life is flirting with the sudden ruin that caused past societies like the Anasazi and the Mayans to vanish. Because this view, too, is exactly what postmodernism longs to hear, "Collapse" may prove influential as well.

Born in Boston in 1937, Diamond is a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Initially he specialized in conservation biology, studying bird diversity in New Guinea; in 1985 he won one of the early MacArthur "genius grants." Gradually he began to wonder why societies of the western Pacific islands never developed the metallurgy, farming techniques or industrial production of Eurasia. Diamond also studied the application of natural-selection theory to physiology, and in 1999 received a National Medal of Science for that work, which is partly reflected in his book "Why Is Sex Fun?" (Sex is fun; the book is serious.) Today Diamond often returns to the Pacific rim, especially Australia, where in the outback one may still hear the rustle of distant animal cries just as our forebears heard them in the far past.

"Collapse" may be read alone, but begins where "Guns, Germs, and Steel" ended: essentially the two form a single 1,000-page book. The thesis of the first part is that environmental coincidences are the principal factor in human history. Diamond contends it was chance, not culture or brainpower, that brought industrial power first to Europe; Western civilization has nothing to boast about.

Many arguments in "Guns" were dazzling. Diamond showed, for example, that as the last ice age ended, by chance Eurasia held many plants that could be bred for controlled farming. The Americas had few edible plants suitable for cross-breeding, while Africa had poor soil owing to the millions of years since it had been glaciated. Thus large-scale food production began first in the Fertile Crescent, China and Europe. Population in those places rose, and that meant lots of people living close together, which accelerated invention; in other locations the low-population hunter-gatherer lifestyle of antiquity remained in place. "Guns" contends the fundamental reason Europe of the middle period could send sailing ships to explore the Americas and Africa, rather than these areas sending sailing ships to explore Europe, is that ancient happenstance involving plants gave Europe a food edge that translated into a head start on technology. Then, the moment European societies forged steel and fashioned guns, they acquired a runaway advantage no hunter-gatherer society could possibly counter.

Also, as the ice age ended, Eurasia was home to large mammals that could be domesticated, while most parts of the globe were not. In early history, animals were power: huge advantages were granted by having cattle for meat and milk, horses and elephants for war. Horses -- snarling devil-monsters to the Inca -- were a reason 169 Spaniards could kill thousands of Incas at the battle of Cajamarca in 1532, for example. "Rhino-mounted Bantu shock troops could have overthrown the Roman Empire," Diamond speculates, but the rhino and other large mammals of Africa defied domestication, leaving that continent at a competitive disadvantage.

Large populations and the fact that Eurasians lived among domesticated animals meant Europe was rife with sicknesses to which the survivors acquired immunity. When Europeans began to explore other lands, their microbes wiped out indigenous populations, easing conquest. Almost all variations in societies, Diamond concludes, are caused not by societies themselves but by "differences in their environments"; the last 500 years of rising power for the West "has its ultimate roots in developments between about 11,000 B.C. and A.D. 1," the deck always stacked in Europe's favor.

In this respect, "Guns, Germs, and Steel" is pure political correctness, and its P.C. quotient was a reason the book won praise. But the book must not be dismissed because it is P.C.: sometimes politically correct is, after all, correct. The flaws of the work are more subtle, and they set the stage for "Collapse." One flaw was that Diamond argued mainly from the archaeological record -- a record that is a haphazard artifact of items that just happened to survive. We know precious little about what was going on in 11,000 B.C., and much of what we think we know is inferential. It may be decades or centuries until we understand human prehistory, if we ever do.

Diamond's analysis discounts culture and human thought as forces in history; culture, especially, is seen as a side effect of environment. The big problem with this view is explaining why China -- which around the year 1000 was significantly ahead of Europe in development, and possessed similar advantages in animals and plants -- fell behind. This happened, Diamond says, because China adopted a single-ruler society that banned change. True, but how did environment or animal husbandry dic-tate this? China's embrace of a change-resistant society was a cultural phenomenon. During the same period China was adopting centrally regimented life, Europe was roiled by the idea of individualism. Individualism proved a potent force, a source of power, invention and motivation. Yet Diamond considers ideas to be nearly irrelevant, compared with microbes and prevailing winds. Supply the right environmental conditions, and inevitably there will be a factory manufacturing jet engines.

Many thinkers have attempted single-explanation theories for history. Such attempts hold innate appeal -- wouldn't it be great if there were a single explanation! -- but have a poor track record. My guess is that despite its conspicuous brilliance, "Guns, Germs, and Steel" will eventually be viewed as a drastic oversimplification. Its arguments come perilously close to determinism, and it is hard to believe that the world is as it is because it had to be that way.

Diamond ended his 1997 book by supposing, "The challenge now is to develop human history as a science." That is what "Collapse" attempts -- to use history as a science to forecast whether the current world order will fail. To research his new book, Diamond traveled to the scenes of vanished societies like Easter Island, Norse Greenland, the Anasazi, the Mayans. He must have put enormous effort into "Collapse," and his willingness to do so after achieving wealth and literary celebrity -- surely publishers would have taken anything he dashed off -- speaks well of his dedication.

"Collapse" spends considerable pages contemplating past life on Easter Island, as well as on Pitcairn and Henderson islands, and on Greenland, an island. Deforestation, the book shows, was a greater factor in the breakdown of societies in these places than commonly understood. Because trees take so long to regrow, deforestation has more severe consequences than crop failure, and can trigger disastrous erosion. Centuries ago, the deforestation of Easter Island allowed wind to blow off the island's thin topsoil: "starvation, a population crash and a descent into cannibalism" followed, leaving those haunting statues for Europeans to find. Climate change and deforestation that set off soil loss, Diamond shows, were leading causes of the Anasazi and Mayan declines. "Collapse" reminds us that like fossil fuels, soil is a resource that took millions of years to accumulate and that humanity now races through: Diamond estimates current global soil loss at 10 to 40 times the rate of soil formation. Deforestation "was a or the major factor" in all the collapsed societies he describes, while climate change was a recurring menace.

How much do Diamond's case studies bear on current events? He writes mainly about isolated islands and pretechnology populations. Imagine the conditions when Erik the Red founded his colony on frigid Greenland in 984 -- if something went wrong, the jig was up. As isolated systems, islands are more vulnerable than continents. Most dire warnings about species extinction, for example, are estimates drawn from studies of island ecologies, where a stressed species may have no place to retreat to. "Collapse" declares that "a large fraction" of the world's species may fall extinct in the next 50 years, which is the kind of conclusion favored by biologists who base their research on islands. But most species don't live on islands. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the leading authority on biodiversity, estimates that about 9 percent of the world's vertebrate species are imperiled. That's plenty bad enough, but does not support the idea that a "large fraction" of species are poised to vanish. Like most species, most people do not live on islands, yet "Collapse" tries to generalize from environmental failures on isolated islands to environmental threats to society as a whole.

Diamond rightly warns of alarming trends in biodiversity, soil loss, freshwater limits (China is depleting its aquifers at a breakneck rate), overfishing (much of the developing world relies on the oceans for protein) and climate change (there is a strong scientific consensus that future warming could be dangerous). These and other trends may lead to a global crash: "Our world society is presently on a nonsustainable course." The West, especially, is in peril: "The prosperity that the First World enjoys at present is based on spending down its environmental capital." Calamity could come quickly: "A society's steep decline may begin only a decade or two after the society reaches its peak numbers, wealth and power."

Because population pressure played a prominent role in the collapses of some past societies, Diamond especially fears population growth. Owing to sheer numbers it is an "impossibility" that the developing world will ever reach Western living standards. Some projections suggest the globe's population, now about 6 billion, may peak at about 8.5 billion. To Diamond, this is a nightmare scenario: defenders of population growth "nonchalantly" mention "adding 'only' 2.5 billion more people . . . as if that were acceptable." Population growth has made Los Angeles "less appealing," especially owing to traffic: "I have never met an Angeleno (and very few people anywhere in the world) who personally expressed a desire for increased population." About the only nonaboriginal society Diamond has kind words for is pre-Meiji Japan, where population control was strictly enforced. But wait -- pre-Meiji Japan collapsed!

If 2.5 billion more people are not "acceptable," how, exactly, would Diamond prevent their births? He does not say. Nuclear war, plague, a comet strike or coerced mass sterilizations seem the only forces that might stop the human population from rising to its predicted peak. Everyone dislikes traffic jams and other aspects of population density, but people are here and cannot be wished away; the challenge is to manage social pressure and create enough jobs until the population peak arrives. And is it really an "impossibility" for developing-world living standards to reach the Western level? A century ago, rationalists would have called global consumption of 78 million barrels per day of petroleum an impossibility, and that's the latest figure.

If trends remain unchanged, the global economy is unsustainable. But the Fallacy of Uninterrupted Trends tells us patterns won't remain unchanged. For instance, deforestation of the United States, rampant in the 19th century, has stopped: forested acreage of the country began rising during the 20th century, and is still rising. Why? Wood is no longer a primary fuel, while high-yield agriculture allowed millions of acres to be retired from farming and returned to trees. Today wood is a primary fuel in the developing world, so deforestation is acute; but if developing nations move on to other energy sources, forest cover will regrow. If the West changes from fossil fuel to green power, its worst resource trend will not continue uninterrupted.

Though Diamond endorses "cautious optimism," "Collapse" comes to a wary view of the human prospect. Diamond fears our fate was set in motion in antiquity -- we're living off the soil and petroleum bequeathed by the far past, and unless there are profound changes in behavior, all may crash when legacy commodities run out. Oddly, for someone with a background in evolutionary theory, he seems not to consider society's evolutionary arc. He thinks backward 13,000 years, forward only a decade or two. What might human society be like 13,000 years from now? Above us in the Milky Way are essentially infinite resources and living space. If the phase of fossil-driven technology leads to discoveries that allow Homo sapiens to move into the galaxy, then resources, population pressure and other issues that worry Diamond will be forgotten. Most of the earth may even be returned to primordial stillness, and the whole thing would have happened in the blink of an eye by nature's standards.

Gregg Easterbrook is an editor of The New Republic, a fellow of the Brookings Institution and the author, most recently, of "The Progress Paradox."

Book Review: Jared Diamond – Guns, Germs, and Steel

While trawling through my computer archives, I stumbled across this book review of Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel” from five years ago . Overall, it’s a great book, better than his follow-up “Collapse”, which is also interesting – especially in the psychological aspects of “collapse”, like creeping normalcy and “landscape amnesia” – but far from the best in the genre (that would be Tainter ).

Diamond, Jared – Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) Category: world systems, history, anthropology; Rating: 5/5 Summary: Guns, Germs, and Steel (wiki)

The underlying thesis in this work is that the environment is the primary shaper of human societies – hence the title of Chapter 2, “A Natural Experiment of History”. Connected with Diamond’s general aim of transforming human history into a scientific discipline, it explains how the Austronesians who populated the Polynesian islands, despite sharing common ancestors in Fujian, China, went on to produce remarkably different societies – agricultural and hunter-gatherer, technologically adept and primitive, oligarchic and egalitarian.

In the next few chapters , he contends that the rise of statehood, and the consequent, self-catalysing technological expansion (producing steel and guns, amongst others) and evolution of germs, was linked to the shift of food-production away from hunter-gathering, which first happened in Eurasia. This is because Eurasia was blessed in possessing an abundant number of nutritious and highly-domesticable crops such as wheat and barley in the Fertile Crescent and rice in China, and also because she possessed an area covered by the world’s largest and most varied Mediterranean climate in southern Europe and south-west Asia, and fertile soils and monsoon rains in China, India and Indochina. It is true that the Americas had corn, and the Africans sourghum – but the shift from hunter-gathering to food-production depends not on a single crop, but on a sufficient amount to offer a secure and balanced diet. The latter was lacking – for instance, of the world’s 56 large-seeded grass species, 32 were in the West Eurasian Mediterranean region, and only 11, 4 and 2 in the (geographically splintered) Americas, Africa and Australasia respectively.

Nor were the extra-Eurasian continents especially suitable for pastoral economies. Of the world’s 143 big wild herbivores, only 14 are domesticable and only five – sheep, goats, cows, pigs and horses – can thrive across a broad range of climates. These discrepencies are due to the so-called Anna Karenina principle, which states that a variety of factors can null the chances of an animal being domesticable – their growth rates, problems of captive breeding, nasty dispositions, tendency to panic, and social structure. According to Diamond, of the 5 major and 9 minor domesticable animals, 13 are indigenous to Eurasia and one (the llama) is indigenous to South America. Africa might have animals that could be tamed (e.g. the elephant), but none that has ever been domesticated. The dearth of big animals in general in the Americas and Australasia is due to the fact that humans, with refined hunting skills, arrived there only 11,000 and 40,000 years ago respectively, and hunted all of them down because the animals had not had time to get used to this. The “lethal gift of livestock” also gave Eurasian peoples germs (as most infectitious diseases originated from human interactions with animals – for instance, flu was derived from pigs and ducks, and measles, smallpox and tuberculosis all derive from cattle), and, consequently, stronger immune systems to the diseases. The resultant fact that the exchange of germs was virtually one-way largely explains successful European colonization of the Americas.

Eurasia, because of it’s main east-west axis, fostered much easier transferals of agricultural and epidemiological breakthroughs. Crops and livestock generally move much more easily along lines of latitude than lines of longitude – thus, Fertile Crescent agriculture spread relatively quickly to southern Europe, north Africa, Iran, north India at a rate of 0.7 miles per year, whereas Mexican corns and beans crawled north to the Mississipi chiefdoms at 0.3 miles per year. The same applied to livestock – “The cool highlands of Mexico would have provided ideal conditions for raising llamas, guinea pigs and potatoes, all domesticated in the cool highlands of the Andes. Yet the northward spread of these Andean specialities was stopped completely by the hot intervening lowlands of Central America.” Whereas crops and livestock can travel relatively easily from Ireland to Korea (despite obstacles such as the Tibetan Plateau, Gobi desert and the jungles of southern India and Indochina), to travel the much smaller distance from Peru to the southern USA, one has to go north and transverse the Darien rainforests of the Isthmus of Panama (only 40 miles wide at its narrowest) and the northern Mexican desert.

What applies to crops and livestock, must also apply to other forms of technology. Writing evolved independently in Sumer by 3000 BC and in Mesoamerica in 600 BC – however, whereas the former spread rapidly throughout Eurasia, the latter never reached the Incas or the Mississippi, where sedendaty food-producing civilizations might have made good use of it. Other examples in Eurasia included the wheel, door locks, pulleys, rotary querns, windmills and the alphabet, whereas the Mesoamerican wheel failed to reach the Incas in Peru.

In conclusion, Eurasian societies were intially much better endowed than their American, African and Australasian counterparts not only in terms of crops and livestock, but also geographically and climatically. Eurasia’s primary east-west axis fostered linked the entire continent economically and epidemiologically, especially after the establishment of the Silk Road in Roman times. More productive agricultural bases, supporting much greater and denser populations, ensured a continuously generated food surplus, to sustain an evolving state appratus and the investment, development of technology and military machine that went with it. Eurasia’s quiltwork of states ensured a competitive environment that put an imperative on change that could not be replicated in the isolated societies of the Americas and Australasia. As a result, by 1500 AD no Native Americans had managed to progress to the Bronze Age and had not developed any deadly germs for the Spanish conquistadores to carry back home. Australia (mostly desert and marginal scrubland) and New Guinea (flat or hilly rainforest) were still in the Stone Age in the second millenium. Tasmania, with its 4000 hunter-gatherers, totally isolated for 10,000 years, had on the eve of its discovery by Europeans in 1642 AD the “simplest material culture of any people in the modern world”. As a result, these differences in development meant that, throughout history, but particularly within the last five hundred years, more advanced Eurasians were able to expand and appropriate the territories of native primitive peoples – examples include Chinese expansion into southeast Asia and the Pacific, the Bantu expansion into sub-Saharan Africa and the European colonization of the Americas, Australasia and Siberia.

Diamond’s epilogue is concerned about why Europe, apparently one of the more backward super-regions on the Eurasian landmass as late as the High Middle Ages, nonetheless was the first to industrialize and dominate the world more fully in its heyday – from the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century – eclipsing ostensibly more powerful medieval empires, primarily China. The author again made use of geographic arguments, leaving aside institutional and cultural factors and relying heavily on E.L. Jones’ “The European Miracle” thesis. Now Europe is, in essence, a highly fragmented continent, separated by numerous mountain ranges (Alps, Carpathians, Pyrenees, etc) and small rivers (Rhine, Po, Oder, Visla, Danube), which support small, scattered population centres in their valleys. Numerous peninsulas and islands (primarily Iberia, Scandinavia, Britain, Italy) have traditionally counter-balanced potential continental hegemons (usually Germany or France). Europe has many different climates – Mediterranean to the south, maritime to the north-west and continental to the east, which produce different products (stimulating trade) and create natural ethnic boundaries (a phenomenom noted as early as the 5th century BC by the Greek historian Herodotus). China is almost the exact opposite – a huge, round piece of flatland, with its population concentrated in the great river valleys of the Yangtze and Hwang Ho (providing a huge and easily controlled source of manpower) and relatively uniform climatic conditions in its historic heartland (the tropical Cantonese south, dry continental Manchuria and Sinkiang and mountanous Tibet are comparatively recent acquisitions and even today are of peripheral economic importance).

As such, China’s “connectedness”, to use Diamond’s term, encouraged political unity and autocracy; Western Europe’s fragmentation fostered a competitive states system, encouraging innovation and technological progress, and precluded the possibility of any single European state conquering the entire continent and stiffling it under a blanket of reaction. Hence, Columbus was able to find a financial backer in 1492 despite several previous rejections; however, court intrigues in Beijing brought to a permanent end Cheng Ho’s oceanic voyaging in 1433 and soon after closed dockyards across the whole Celestial Empire. As for the Fertile Crescent, intensive agriculture since 8500BC brought an ecological degradation that intensified due to the Mongol invasions of the 13th century and subsequent destruction of complex irrigation infrastructure.

Two main arguments have been leveled against this book. The first is that China is not necessarily geographically more suited to unification than Western Europe, that the values of fragmentation are not necessaily greater than of unity, and most importantly that Europe owes its “miracle” more to its institutions – “the devolution of power implicit in feudalism and the scope for free thought created by the independence of the medieval Christian church from political control” (from David Frum’s review, “ How the West Won: History That Feels Good Usually Isn’t “) – than to any geo-climatic conditions, which invoke the derogatory label of “historical determinism”. I’ll address these contentions one after the other. In his review of the book, J.R. McNeill in “ The World According to Jared Diamond ” wrote, “Europe may or may not have a geography that encourages greater fragmentation than does China’s (and I think this is open to question if one leaves out the Grand Canal, a man-made link). ” Apart from the evidence above, and the fact that the Grand Canal was constructed during the Sui dynasty (581-618 AD) and as such affected China for the majority of its history after the first unification in 221 BC under Shih-Huang-ti, we also know that the multitude of plains could support a might horseman army, which could exert political control over the huge, densely-clustered population centres of the Middle Kingdom. In fact this is the primary reasons why the Mongols (whose main strategic strength was in their speed and functionality without logistics) were able to conquer late Sung China, but wisely decided to stay away from Europe, where the land west of the Hungarian plains, containing only forests, mountains and areas of intensive agriculture, could not have supported a single tyumen. Hence, Europeans relied on decisively less mobile and more logistically demanding traditions of infantry and castle sieges, which made rapid conquests of vast areas practically unrealizable.

Slightly later, McNeill writes that, “political fragmentation is not necessarily an advantage, indeed in some circumstances, such as the presence of a powerful and aggressive neighbor, it is a weakness”. The argument is made that although Europe was always a political quiltwork, it only started to become formidable after the first milennium. There are several weaknesses to this position – Europe, especially the “barbarian kingdoms” north of the Alps, was before the first millenium extremely backwards in comparison with any other major Eurasian civilization – China, Byzantium, the Arabs and India, but by the 14th century at the latest the qualitative gap had closed even with China. This suggests average rates of development were much higher in feudal Europe than in Asia. Besides, Europe never truly had a life-threatening neighbor – the Arabs were halted at the Battle of Poitiers in 732 by Charles Martel, the pagan Vikings were Christianized around the 10th century and it was Rus’ and Byzantium that took the brunt of nomadic assaults by groups like the Pechenegs and the Polovtsians (Cumans). McNeill draws an example with politically fragmented India, which however “did not generate highly efficient states and technologically precocious societies bent on expansion and conquest”. Admittedly, my knowledge in this area is shallow – and doubt the validity of that statement, given that India was the home of higher mathematics and that its port cities grew very wealthy off the trade of the Indian Ocean. Also, other factors may be more prescient at explaining this, such as India’s isolation from the main routes of the Silk Road, its stratified caste system (which discouraged innovation) and perhaps “Dark Ages” stemming from the plethora of outside barbarian invasions.

Finally, David Frum contributed the third and most important point to this institutional counter-argument. I will quote from his review in extenso.

At least in this century, the traditional account of the rise of the West has given credit to its propitious political and social institutions. That is not true only of recent times, when the institutions in question are liberal ones, but of more ancient history as well, when the West benefited from the devolution of power implicit in feudalism and the scope for free thought created by the independence of the medieval Christian church from political control. And that traditional account agreed, with varying degrees of certainty, that those traditions were more or less available to anyone else and would have more or less similar results wherever they were tried.

Again, however, numerous holes can be picked in the text. The Church might have been independent of political control, but it was dogmatic in its views and consistently anti-capitalistic (e.g. the ban on usury). This is the reason so much commerce was in the hands of Jews in medieval Europe. Independent thought as such would have been confined to universities which began to be founded in 13th century, and these tended to support the monarch over the Pope. As for feudalism, it was based on the self-sufficient agricultural economy of the manor, economically isolated following the collapse of Roman order. Although I think a period of feudalism, which develops the idea of the contract (in addition to the Roman idea of private property) is a very useful precedent to capitalism, we must ask ourselves, why did it develop in Europe, and not in China? After all, China does have a long history of “warring states’ periods, including the post-Han economic downturn and fragmentation from 220 to 581 AD, which coincided with the fall of Rome. However, conditions in European were far more suited for the emergence of a feudalistic societies – firstly, “barbarian kingdoms lacked the bureaucratic and literate resources to rule directly over great areas”, unlike the Confucian bureaucracy which held China together until the twentieth century. Secondly, it had precedents in the fusion of Roman concepts of property with the Germanic “blood-brotherhood of the warrior-companians of the barbarian chief”, which was respectively partially and completely lacking in China. Last but not least, that same geographical fragmentation and relative lack of plains frustrated assertative European monarchs attempting to bring to heel some remote rebelling vassal, let alone maintain effective political unity.

The second important argument was made by McNeill and contends that ultimately “the spread of useful species was usually a conscious act…determined by trade links, migration routes, and happenstance”. He argues as an example that a single line of latitude on Eurasia could vary greatly, from “the Gulf Stream-induced equability of western Europe, to the continental climate extremes of Kazakhstan, to the monsoon rhythms of Korea”, and consequently make the dispersion of animal and plant species very hard. He also attributes a lot of this dispersion as due to trade within Eurasia. Again, these criticisms have their flaws. For instance, jungles present much more of a barrier than continental plains or even desert, because of the greater number of diseases they harbor and because they are much more physically hard to pass. I think another crucial factor is that significant climate shifts, that have played a very large role triggering nomadic migrations and expansions within and out of the Eurasian Great Steppe, are lacking in rainforests, encouraging a more permanent existence. As for the second argument, it is downright irrelevant in the context of the book, because Eurasia as a continent only started to become contiguous with the genesis of the Silk Road during Roman times. By then, all the key crops and livestocks were already in place, that had generated the rise of the civilizations which were only then beginning to communicate with each other, albeit in rudimentary form, over thousands of kilometers.

Having attempted to disprove two existing criticisms of the book, I would nonetheless wish to make a few of my own. One is how he rather hypocritically claims New Guineans are more intelligent than Eurasians, after just having had condemned white racist theories whose argumentative style in their specialization are similar to his in this instance. And I think he could have covered the scope of the last chapter of his book beyond an analysis of why Europe “won” and China “lost” – Middle Eastern societies were mentioned little (and the argument of environmental degradation was admittedly somewhat lost on me, considering that Egypt has managed to sustain a massive agricultural base from pharaonic times to the present day), and India and Russia not at all. (At least in the latter case there is a plethora of geoclimatic factors that negatively affected its development and covered in such books as Andrej Parshev’s “Why Russia isn’t America”).

In conclusion, this is overall an excellent book which is a must-read for people in professions as varied as biology, geography, history, archaelogy, anthropology, sociology and economics, as well as the intelligent layman. Apart from the invaluable information and insights, it is written in concise, engaging and understandable language and one would be challenged to put it down after having read just a few pages.

Inventor of Idiot’s Limbo , the Katechon Hypothesis , and Elite Human Capital.

Apart from writing books , reviews , travel writing , and sundry blogging, I Tweet at @ powerfultakes and run a Substack newsletter .

Diamond’s book is excellent, but he seems to start out with a pre-set conclusion and omits information that contradicts his position. For instance, he doesn’t mention that people become somewhat genetically adapted to their environment through natural selection.

And more recent research by geneticists such as Bruce Lahn, Eric Wang, Scott Williamson and Benjamin Voight, in fact confirms that genetic changes actually accelerated about 10,000 years ago at the time agriculture intensified and populations in Asia and Europe expanded rapidly.

(see for example: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/09/science/09brain.html?pagewanted=print )

More recent books like ‘Before the Dawn’ by New York Times science reporter Nicholas Wade or ‘The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution’ by Harpending and Cochran build on Diamond’s book in this respect.

There was actually an article just a week or so ago in the New York Times discussing how culture influenced natural selection.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/science/02evo.html

The sole purpose of Jared Diamond’s book was to disprove racial theories of history, which to him are ‘loathsome’ and ‘abhorrent’. In other words, from the outset his book was politically motivated. This is why we have to be so careful when dealing with these ‘grand narratives’ of history like Diamond’s. Diamond wants easy answers to complicated questions because his sole intent was to rubbish racial theories of history. I really don’t know why anyway, considering few historians today even consider race as an important factor in any historical episode. It is also bizarre that an anthropologist and biologist (correct me if I’m wrong) would be so interested in denigrating the importance of biology and evolution in the formation of human societies, and vice versa.

Gene Callahan has written an excellent critique of Guns, Germs and Steel called ‘The Diamond Fallacy’, and I suggest everybody read it. Certainly, Diamond’s work has its merits, chiefly in drawing our attention to the importance of geographical location as a (sub-)factor driving human affairs. But Diamond isn’t a historian. I don’t mean this to be libelous, but clearly when he wrote Guns he did so from a position of blithe ignorance of the nature of history. History is not a scientific discipline which can be subject to its laws. If Diamond thinks he discovered any ‘laws of history’, he is quite mistaken. Diamond’s thesis basically reduces history to a single factor of geographical determinism, and when you think of all the complicated factors operating throughout history – political, social, cultural, the decisions of individuals – many of them cumulative, you realize how absurd his theories really are.

A book which really ought to be thrown in with all the rest of the political literature, save the history shelf for actual history.

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Guns, Germs, and Steel

Jared diamond, recommended by, book reviews.

Daniel Ek: "A brilliant Pulitzer Prize–winning book about how the modern world was formed, analyzing how societies developed differently on different continents.

I like how this is written from a biologist’s point of view rather than purely based on history or anthropology."

Joe Rogan: "Guns Germs and Steel is an amazing book."

Charlie Munger recommended 'Guns, Germs, and Steel' in his book Poor Charlie's Almanack.

Included on Jamie Dimon's list of favorite books he sent to JP Morgan summer interns in 2010.

Raoul Pal said 'Guns, Germs, and Steel' influenced his macro thinking on Twitter.

Book Summary

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.

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.

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Guns, Germs, and Steel

Jared diamond, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

In Guns, Germs, and Steel , Jared Diamond outlines the theory of geographic determinism, the idea that the differences between societies and societal development arise primarily from geographical causes. The book is framed as a response to a question that Diamond heard from Yali , a charismatic New Guinean politician. Yali wanted to know, “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo … but we black people had little cargo of our own?”—in other words, why have European societies been so militarily, economically, and technologically successful in the last 500 years, while other societies have not approached such a level of achievement?

In Part One of the book, Diamond sketches out the course of recent human history, emphasizing the differences between civilizations. Beginning about half a million years ago, the first human beings emerged in Africa, and eventually migrated around the rest of the world in search of game and other sources of food. About 11,000 years ago, certain human beings developed agriculture—a major milestone in human history. By the 15th century A.D., enormous differences had arisen between civilizations. For example, when Francisco Pizarro led a Spanish expedition to the Inca Empire in the early 16th century, he was able to defeat the Incan Emperor, Atahuallpa , easily. Why did the Europeans colonize the New World, and not the other way around?

In Part Two, Diamond talks about the dawn of agriculture and explains why it arose in certain parts of the world, but not others. Using carbon-dating technology, archaeologists have determined that the first sites of agriculture were Mesopotamia (in the Middle East), followed by Mesoamerica and China. Agriculture arose in those areas for a few reasons. Most of the human beings on the planet at the time were hunter-gatherers, meaning that they hunted game and picked nuts and berries for their food. But in the parts of the world that first developed agriculture, game and fruit were becoming scarcer, motivating experimentation with new forms of food production. In Mesopotamia, ancient humans used trial and error to learn how to plant certain large seeds in the earth, resulting in crops that could be harvested and converted into highly nutritious foods. These early peoples also learned how to domesticate wild animals, breeding familiar modern animals like dogs, cows, and horses. Humans used their domesticated animals to assist with agricultural work, while also learning how to domesticate certain wild crops, breeding most of the world’s familiar modern crops.

Agriculture arose in Mesoamerica and China. Due to environmental qualities like soil fertility, availability of domesticable animals, and availability of edible crops, however, it took a longer time for agriculture to supplant hunter-gatherer culture in most other regions. Once agriculture had arisen around the world, it spread or diffused to neighboring regions. By and large, Diamond argues, it is easier for ideas, goods, and foods to spread from east to west than it is for them to spread north and south—this is because the Earth spins east-west, meaning that areas with the same latitude share a similar climate and environment. Archaeological data indicates that agricultural innovations diffused east and west far sooner than they diffused north and south.

In Part Three, Diamond shows how basic agricultural differences between early societies magnified over time, leading to vast differences between societies’ health, technology, and social structure. First, he shows that agricultural societies developed immunities to deadly diseases like smallpox. Constant proximity to domesticated animals, combined with increased population density, meant that new germs were constantly circulating in agricultural societies. As a result, these societies became resistant to many epidemics—those who couldn’t survive died off, while those with immunities survived and passed on their immunities to their offspring.

Another important development in the history of agricultural societies was the invention of written language. While it’s difficult to show exactly why writing emerged in certain agricultural societies but not others, it’s clear that the structure of agriculture society (which requires lots of record-keeping for crops) put a high premium on a writing system. Furthermore, east-west diffusion patterns ensured that, once one society developed language, it diffused, along with agriculture itself, to surrounding areas, particularly those with similar latitude.

The history of language acts as a case study for the history of technology in general. While it’s again difficult to explain why certain inventors develop certain inventions, the structure of agricultural societies favored the invention of new technologies. This is true for a number of reasons. Agricultural societies lead to the creation of leisure time, since crops can be stored for long periods—in their leisure time, citizens of early agricultural societies experimented with the resources and raw materials around them. Additionally, agricultural societies were denser than hunter-gatherer societies, increasing the velocity with which people exchanged ideas. As a result, agricultural societies developed more new technologies than hunter-gatherer societies, and passed on their innovations to neighboring agricultural societies.

Ancient agricultural societies tend to develop into large, complex states. While the earliest agricultural societies were “bands” and small tribes, these small tribes gradually merged into larger and larger societies, either through conquering or mutual agreement. As societies became larger and denser, they tended to develop centralized structures of power—in other words, a central leadership that commanded a set of subordinate leaders, who in turn commanded local groups of people. States ruled through a balance of kleptocracy—i.e., leaders ordering their subjects to give up a portion of their possessions—and religion or patriotic fervor. By the 16th century—not coincidentally, the time when Europe was beginning its conquest of the New World—the state had become the dominant mode of society.

In Part Four, Diamond looks at a series of case studies that support his theory. In the first, he demonstrates that the New Guineans developed agriculture, sophisticated technology, and political centralization while the neighboring aborigines of Australia did not, due to geographic distances and factors like the ones sketched out in Part Two. He also argues that China was able to become the world’s first large, centralized state for environmental reasons—the temperate climate and homogeneous geography enabled easy communication and political unification between the states of China. The New Guineans were more successful than their neighbors, the peoples of Java and Borneo, in staving off European colonization and massacre in the 18th and 19th centuries, largely because their agricultural practices made them resistant to malaria, preventing colonists from staying for too long on their island. In the New World, agriculture arose in certain regions, but did not diffuse to neighboring regions due to the presence of geographic barriers like deserts and mountains. Finally, Diamond studies the history of Africa and argues that the Bantu peoples of North Africa were more militarily successful than their sub-Saharan neighbors because they developed some limited forms of agriculture. In the sub-Saharan environment, however, peoples didn’t have any way of developing agriculture, so their societies never had the time or organization to develop complex technologies.

In conclusion, Diamond argues, the differences between different peoples and societies of the world are largely attributable to geographic differences between different regions of the world. In certain parts of the world, humans began pursuing agriculture because the fertile soil and temperate climate made agriculture a good use of time and resources. Agricultural societies then gained tremendous advantages over non-agricultural societies, because the increase in leisure time enabled people to develop technologies and centralized political structures, and the proximity to animals gave people immunities to deadly diseases. As a result, some societies were able to conquer others.

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Review: Guns, Germs, and Steel

Not long after Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492, other Europeans sail to the New World and conquered the peoples there. The various Native American tribes, the Aztecs, the Incas — all eventually submitted to people from countries far across the waters. Most students of history can identify the immediate cause for the triumph of the victors: the Europeans had guns, they brought germs to which the natives were not immune, and they made use of steel, a material unknown in the Americas at that time. But, looking back in time even further, why is it that those in the peoples of the Americas did not have these fateful possessions, and why did they not instead conquer Europeans? That is the fundamental question that Jared Diamond wants to answer in Guns, Germs, and Steel , a book in which he presents a general theory which he believes he solves the puzzle.

It’s not really a theory; rather, it’s more of a story of different overarching fundamental forces that guide the development of societies. To summarize: All societies started out as small groups ("bands") which hunted animals and gathered food, making them "hunter-gatherers." Due to geographical happenstance, several areas of the world had a higher distribution of plants which could more easily be domesticated. When these plants were domesticated in these areas, the people settled down and tended crops.

These areas, again effectively through sheer luck, also had a higher distribution of animals that could be domesticated. Once they were domesticated, the animals could assist with cultivation and labor. These two main factors, domesticated plants and domesticated animals, set the scene for hunter-gatherers to become "food producers."

Food producers, versus hunter-gatherers, were not nomadic, but lived and worked in a small area. They could have children more often, because they could stay in one place and raise them. Their crops, especially with the assistance of the domesticated animals, could feed a larger population. Hence, these bands of people at this point grew into "tribes", then into "chiefdoms," and eventually into "states," the form of government most familiar today.

These larger societies, by their very nature, could (and inevitably did) evolve job specialization and a hierarchy of government. Some could be leaders, while others could be workers — the workers could produce food, which they would give to the leaders for them to redistribute. Large populations also have a bigger chance of inventions being created, and the structured labor system of these larger societies made a more receptive environment of these inventions to be accepted and put to use. The inventions of guns and steel were ready to take place.

This hierarchy of government and specialization of duty made it possible for soldiers and armies to exist. These larger populations could afford to send specially-trained soldiers, under command of their leaders, to conquer other societies who, through geographic bad luck, had never domesticated animals, never grown crops, and had no leaders, soldiers, or inventions to fight back with.

As with guns and steel, Diamond believes that germs, the third element in his book’s title, was also a result of animal domestication and food production. He explains that many diseases evolve from similar varieties found in animals, and only societies with domesticated animals will be likely to allow such a disease to make the crossover to humans. Furthermore, many diseases require large, concentrated populations to actually allow these diseases to reproduce, evolve, and spread without being quickly wiped out through natural processes. The same societies that had the social structure necessary to conquer other peoples also created the inventions (read, "weapons") needed to do so, and also harbored (and in many cases, were immune to) weapons unknown to societies which were not so lucky.

That’s my summary. The closest thing to a summary that Jared Diamond presents might be, "...food production led to high population densities, germs, technology, political organization, and other ingredients of power. Peoples who, by accident of their geographical location, inherited or developed food production thereby became able to engulf geographically less endowed people" (386).

This overall view of history becomes quite clear a little over 3/4 of the way through the book, and the last few chapters become almost repetitious. But that’s fine, because Guns, Germs, and Steel is such an interesting, apparently well-researched book that at times I forgot exactly why I was reading it — that is, I forgot that there was some question to which we were searching the answer. In explaining his answer, Diamond must explain multitudes of other concepts, bringing to light facts that could be stories in themselves: did you know, for example, that wild almonds are poisonous, or that strawberries and pecans are recent domestications?

From the start, Diamond explains that such and undertaking as Guns, Germs, and Steel requires a person with very diverse areas of expertise, a fact that is really not appreciable until you have read the entire book. Diamond claims he is up to the task, though, and I certainly am in no position to contradict him. Even if a couple of explanations seem at first glance slightly dubious, such as the affect of the orientation of the axes of the continents (Chapter 10, "Spacious Skies and Tilted Axes"), on second thought his explanation sounds quite plausible, and it would seem quite difficult to tear holes in so much of his theory as to force one to discard its basis.

Indeed, at the end of the book Diamond’s "theory" does not seem like a theory, but more of a layperson’s explanation of what seems almost evident by all the sciences, if only one were intimately familiar with all of them. It seems so simple and obvious at times, one wonders if everyone else has simply not taken the time to write it all down. But that only goes to show what a good job Diamond has done here, in taking years of research and piles of materials and assembling a work that seems both simple and obvious. Guns, Germs, and Steel is thus something of a reading requirement that will give one an overall view, of the evolution of populations, the development of societies, and the history of conquests.

One interesting thing I found throughout the book is Diamond’s reference to humans killing other humans, as though that were the natural result of humans interacting. He seems to assert that governments and relations have but one purpose: to prevent people from killing one another. Diamond thus seems to have quite a pessimistic view of innate human morality, but in light of history I would have to contemplate this much more before attempting any disagreements.

Jared Diamond has spent many years among the peoples of New Guinea (his friend Yali’s question helped spark the idea for the book) and much of his study has been concerning this area of the world; this becomes evident by the high occurrence of such related information in the book. Diamond nevertheless gives a comprehensive treatment of not only all the world, but also most of relevant (for humans, anyway) history and prehistory. His book will give you a broad overview of the evolution of societies on Earth that seems very plausible. Even if the reasons he give for the disproportionate distribution of guns, germs, and steel are completely incorrect, the information found in Guns, Germs, and Steel would ensure that it be no less required reading.

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Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

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Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies Hardcover – January 1, 1997

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Guns, Germs & Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

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Book 1 of 3 Civilizations Rise and Fall
Print length 480 pages
Language English
Publisher W W Norton & Co Inc
Publication date January 1, 1997
Dimensions 6.5 x 1.5 x 9.75 inches
ISBN-10 0393038912
ISBN-13 978-0393038910
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Why did Christendom enthusiastically and permanently adopt the wheel, the key element in most machinery, while the Islamic societies largely discarded it? What happened when syphilis first appeared, as compared to what is happening today with the appearance of AIDS? What is happening to society in the highlands of Diamond's home-away-from-home, Paupa New Guinea, where people have hurtled from the technology of the stone ax to that of the computer within a lifetime? Diamond's lesson is this: Think big like our astronomers, who begin their training not by trying to understand the nervous gyrations of the members of the asteroid belt but the simple and stately movements of the major planets over the years, decades and centuries. Think big. "Guns, Germs, and Steel" is a provocative start. -- Alfred W. Crosby, Los Angeles Times 3/9/97

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ W W Norton & Co Inc; First Edition (January 1, 1997)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 480 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0393038912
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0393038910
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.06 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 1.5 x 9.75 inches
#1,326 in Human Geography (Books)
#1,471 in General Anthropology
#1,807 in History of Civilization & Culture

About the author

Jared diamond.

Jared Diamond is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, which was named one of TIME’s best non-fiction books of all time, the number one international bestseller Collapse and most recently The World Until Yesterday. A professor of geography at UCLA and noted polymath, Diamond’s work has been influential in the fields of anthropology, biology, ornithology, ecology and history, among others.

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Book Summary: Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
Book Review: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
A Review of Guns, Germs, and Steel (ebook), Stephen Crawford
Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000

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COMMENTS

'Guns, Germs, and Steel'
Hence Guns, Germs, and Steel discusses the differences among continental environments responsible for Eurasia's head start: especially the differences among plant and animal species suitable for domestication, and among continental areas, isolations, axes, and internal geographic barriers. Mr. McNeill faults me for underemphasizing cultural ...
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Terrible. This is one of those books which seems at face value as if it has an interesting and persuasive thesis, and indeed there are a couple of reasonable points in here, but by and large Guns, Germs, and Steel is a poorly written book, shoddily argued and riddled with factual errors. Jared Diamond's thesis is that the differences which one can observe in technological and economic ...
Guns, Germs and Steel
Tim Radford reviews Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond ... This is an exhilarating book. Not all the argument is quite as beautifully constructed as the passages that deal with plants and ...
Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Dr Tom Tomlinson, review of Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, (review no. 51) https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/51 ... This book is inspired by just such a cross-cultural encounter as that between Kamal the border raider and the Colonel's son of the Guides. In the first chapter the author recounts a conversation that he ...
GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL
GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL. The prose is not brilliant, and there are apologies and redundancies that we could do without. But a fair answer to Yali's... MacArthur fellow and UCLA evolutionary biologist Diamond ( The Third Chimpanzee, 1992, etc.) takes as his theme no less than the rise of human civilizations. On the whole this is an impressive ...
Guns, Germs, and Steel
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (subtitled A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years in Britain) is a 1997 transdisciplinary non-fiction book by the American author Jared Diamond.The book attempts to explain why Eurasian and North African civilizations have survived and conquered others, while arguing against the idea that Eurasian hegemony is due to any form ...
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Amazon.com: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies: 9780393317558: ... - James Shreeve, New York Times Book Review "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 analyzing some of the basic workings of culture process.... One of the most ...
Book Reviews
Book Reviews Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. Jared Diamond. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997, 480 pp. J. Philippe Rushton University of Western Ontario Guns, Germs, and Steel, the author tells us, grew out of his attempt to answer "Yali's question." Yali, a New Guinea native, allegedly asked jared Diamond, an
'Collapse': How the World Ends
In this respect, "Guns, Germs, and Steel" is pure political correctness, and its P.C. quotient was a reason the book won praise. But the book must not be dismissed because it is P.C.: sometimes ...
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies ...
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize • New York Times Bestseller • Over Two Million Copies Sold "One of the most significant projects embarked upon by any intellectual of our generation" (Gregg Easterbrook, New York Times), Guns, Germs, and Steel presents a groundbreaking, unified narrative of human history. Why did Eurasians conquer, displace, or decimate Native Americans, Australians, and ...
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
In this book, book, Jared Diamond argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. 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.
Book Summary: Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
This is my book summary of Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. My notes are informal and often contain quotes from the book as well as my own thoughts. This summary also includes key lessons and important passages from the book. History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences in their environments not ...
Book Review: Jared Diamond
Diamond, Jared - Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) Category: world systems, history, anthropology; Rating: 5/5. Summary: Guns, Germs, and Steel (wiki) Having finished reading this book in November 2004, I came away impressed by its success in compressing 13,000 years of human history into a lucid and compelling explanation of why the rate of ...
Guns, Germs, and Steel: Book Recommendations & Review
Book Reviews. Daniel Ek: "A brilliant Pulitzer Prize-winning book about how the modern world was formed, analyzing how societies developed differently on different continents. I like how this is written from a biologist's point of view rather than purely based on history or anthropology." Joe Rogan: "Guns Germs and Steel is an amazing book."
Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond: 9780307932426
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Guns, Germs and Steel examines the rise of civilization and the issues its development has raised throughout history. ... An ambitious, highly important book.—James Shreeve, New York Times Book Review A book of remarkable scope, a history of the world in less than 500 pages which succeeds admirably, where so many ...
Guns, Germs, and Steel: A Review by J. Philippe Rushton
A review of Jared Diamond's 'Guns, Germs, and Steel', a geographico-cultural determinist account of the origins of human intergroup differences, by Jean-Philippe Rushton, the hereditarian professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario, famous for his book 'Race, Evolution, Behavior: A Life History Perspective', which controversially applied r/K selection theory to human ...
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
The New York Review of Books. Guns, Germs and Steel lays a foundation for understanding human history, which makes it fascinating in its own right. Because it brilliantly describes how chance advantages can lead to early success in a highly competitive environment, it also offers useful lessons for the business world and for people interested ...
Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond Plot Summary
Guns, Germs, and Steel Summary. In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond outlines the theory of geographic determinism, the idea that the differences between societies and societal development arise primarily from geographical causes. The book is framed as a response to a question that Diamond heard from Yali, a charismatic New Guinean politician.
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
My summary from Littler Books:1. The book's title refers to how societies conquered others -- with guns, germs, and steel.2. Environmental, not biological factors shaped the differences between societies.3. Eurasia (Asia, Europe, and North Africa) had incidental environmental traits that helped its people achieve dominance.4.
Guns, Germs, and Steel
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize • New York Times Bestseller • Over Two Million Copies Sold "One of the most significant projects embarked upon by any intellectual of our generation" (Gregg Easterbrook, New York Times) , Guns, Germs, and Steel presents a groundbreaking, unified narrative of human history.</p>, Guns, Germs, and Steel, The Fates of Human Societies, Jared Diamond, 9780393354324
All Book Marks reviews for Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human
Guns, Germs, and Steel is an artful, informative, and delightful book, full of surprises for a historian like myself who is unaccustomed to examining the human record from the vantage point of New Guinea and Australia, as Jared Diamond has set out to do ... there is nothing like a radically new angle of vision for bringing out unsuspected dimensions of a subject, and that is what Jared Diamond ...
Review: Guns, Germs, and Steel
Reviews ☰ Review: Guns, Germs, and Steel Title Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies Author Jared Diamond Publisher W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, NY, 1997 ISBN ... As with guns and steel, Diamond believes that germs, the third element in his book's title, was also a result of animal domestication and food production
Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
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 ...