Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
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rated it did not like it
This is what happens when you take an intelligent person, and casually make a few mentions of a field of study they have no knowledge of.
Mr. Diamond, NOT an anthropologist, takes Marvin Harris' theory of cultural materialism and uses it to explain everything in life, history, and the current state of the world.
Materialism is a way of looking at human culture which, for lack of a better way to explain it easily here, says that people's material needs and goods determine behavior and culture. For
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[Original review, Dec 10 2008]
I liked this book, and it taught me a bunch of things I hadn't known before I read it. Jared Diamond has clearly had a more interesting life than most of us, and spent significant amounts of time in a wide variety of different kinds of society, all over the world. He says he got the basic idea from a conversation he had back in the 70s with a friend in New Guinea. His friend, who later became a leader in the independence movement, wanted to talk about "cargo" (manuf
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“Why you white men have so much cargo [i.e., steel tools and other products of civilization] and we New Guineans have so little?”
Jared Diamond is a biologist, who had a passion for studying birds, particularly the birds of New Guinea. But as he came to know and appreciate the many native people he met in his work, the question asked by a New Guinean named Yani remained with him. Why was it that westerners had so much relative to New Guinean natives, who had been living on that land for forty ...more
rated it really liked it
Author Jared Diamond's two-part thesis is: 1) the most important theme in human history is that of civilizations beating the crap out of each other, 2) the reason the beat-ors were Europeans and the beat-ees the Aboriginees, Mayans, et. al. is because of the geographical features of where each civilization happened to develop. Whether societies developed gunpowder, written language, and other technological niceties, argues Diamond, is completely a function of whether they emerged amidst travel-a ...more
It took me a while to complete Diamond's book (and admittedly I also distracted myself with a few Roth novels in the meantime) because of the density of the text and the variety of ideas presented. The central thesis that it is not racial biology that determines the victors in history but rather a complex combination of agriculture, geography, population density, and continental orientation is a fascinating and compelling one. The style is not academic (and did admittedly put me off by using sen ...more
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 development around the world do not result from racial differences but rather from geographical ones: the variet ...more
This may be the most over-rated book in the history of book rating. The point he is making is that we in Western Civilazation haven't built skyscrapers, made moon landings, mass produced automobiles, eradicated polio (or for that matter lived indoors with running water) while aborigines in certain remote outposts still hunt and gather in isolated tribes because we are inherently any smarter or more industrious than those individuals. Of course he is mostly right, but why in the 21st century is t ...more
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, 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 of Eurasian intellectual, moral, or inherent genetic superiority.
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies is a 1997 trans-disciplinary non-fiction book by Jared Diamond, professor of geography and physiology at the University of Californ
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In 1532, Francisco Pizarro and a band of 168 Spaniards punctured the heart of the Inca Empire and proceeded to capture its emperor, decimate its citizens, and plunder its gold. Why didn’t it happen the other way around? Why didn't the Incas sail to Europe, capture Charles V, kill his subjects, and loot his castles and cathedrals? Jared Diamond attempts to answer this question in Guns, Germs & Steel.
Why have Europeans tended to dominate other peoples on other continents? Does it have something t
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Jared sticks to the basic premise and plugs every hole in his argument so well to construct a magnificent explanation of the evolution of societies. What makes the book particularly good is the intimate hands-on experience that Jared has on the wide variety of fields required to attempt a book like this.
The last four or five chapters start to get very repetitive, but except for that Diamond has taken a stunningly large scale view of history that keeps you enthralled throughout the 13,000 years
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The Purist
I give you now Professor Twist,
A conscientious scientist,
Trustees exclaimed, "He never bungles!"
And sent him off to distant jungles.
Camped on a tropic riverside,
One day he missed his loving bride.
She had, the guide informed him later,
Been eaten by an alligator.
Professor Twist could not but smile.
"You mean," he said, "a crocodile."
That bit of Ogden Nash whimsy came into my head as I thought about Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, a reflection on human history through the lens of e
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Why didn't the indigenous people of the Americas, Oceania, and sub-equatorial Africa conquer Europe and its people? Why was it the other way around?
Why didn't agriculture, cities, the wheel, writing, craftsmanship of metal processing originate in Europe? Why did it instead originate in the Fertile Crescent (Mesopotamia) and its surrounding areas? These are some very intriguing questions discussed in Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997) written by Jared Diamond.
This book i
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“In short, Europe’s colonization of Africa had nothing to do with differences between European and African peoples themselves, as white racists assume. Rather, it was due to accidents of geography and biogeography—in particular, to the continents’ different areas, axes, and suites of wild plant and animal species. That is, the different historical trajectories of Africa and Europe stem ultimately from differences in real estate.”
- Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel
This is one of those books
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Diamond attempts to "provide a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years," AND answer the question of why some cultures thrive while others perish or are conquered by others. There is a mind-boggling amount of information presented: some of it is fascinating, some of it seems repetitive, and overly long. When my husband, who is a big fan of "farming books," thinks that there was WAY TOO MUCH about agriculture. . . well, that kind of tells you something.
I listened to this on audio, (a
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This is a thought-provoking, deeply interesting, controversial book investigating the reasons behind the bafflingly different rate of development of human societies in different parts of the world.
The main thesis of the author is that geographic aspects represent the overwhelming ultimate set of causal factors, and they played out mostly at the very beginning of societal development, mainly in prehistoric times.
The author uses very broad brush strokes to develop his main themes, both in geogra
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Did you ever wonder if there is a certain inevitability in the way world history has evolved? Jared Diamond argues, in effect, that the giant Eurasian continent (Europe and Asia combined) was predestined to take over the world. Everything conspired in its favor: climate, vegetation, population distribution, mineral resources and even bacteria. Compare Eurasia and Australia, for example, and you find that when humans evolved to the point of beginning agriculture, Eurasia had dozens of varieties o ...more
I have this awesome picture in my head in which Jared Diamond did not write this book. He instead wrote a detailed, engaging account of the history of plant and animal domestication.
"But Rhiannon," you might say, "doesn't that remove his entire thesis, that geography determined just about everything about the course of human civilization?"
And, I would respond yes, it does.
"And, isn't that kind of removing the whole book?"
No, I counter. It just removes the douche-y social Darwinist parts. Plus, i
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This is an ambitious book. It seeks to provide a simple rationale to explain why inequalities exist between the peoples of the world. What makes its approach fresh is that the analysis is from someone who is neither an economist nor a historian. Broadly speaking, Diamond pulls this off. His style is readable and his arguments well laid out. His conclusions about the importance in early human history of having the right plants and animals to promote the vital first step for a civilisation – that ...more
Jared Diamond asks the question: why did technology develop along different lines and at different times throughout the world and then goes on to study the reasons why.
Using economic, sociological, anthropological, biological and botanical evidence to examine and analyze his hypotheticals, Diamond goes on to map out the world not just in geography but in time, providing a unique human history going back tens of thousands of years and culminating with how we’ve ended up – with some people typing
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3 stars
Guns, Germs, and Steel was recommended to me by my father. He asked me to read it and tell him what I thought of what Jared Diamond says. Generally speaking, this book outlines the different factors that contribute to a society succeeding and thriving, and how these factors have created the world we live in today. To answer my father, I said that I enjoyed it. It made me reflect a lot, it helped me form arguments in my IB ESS class, and in general gave me a nice insight into human history
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rated it did not like it
I will say this: he makes some interesting points about geographical and geological determinism and the potential validity thereof. Everything else, however, is basically shit. The Pulitzer this book got must have been the world's biggest and most expensive A for effort.
Diamond writes in his introduction that a multi-discipline effort "would be doomed from the outset, because the essence of the problem is to develop a unified synthesis. That consideration dictates single authorship, despite all
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My first intention reading this book is not to seek knowledge in the real world, but to understand more about the setting/world making of fantasy fiction and science fiction. But this book gave me so much more than that, it gave me answers or some revelations about some of my personal thinking all these years.
I cannot comment much about the contents, there are a lot of reviews that describe the contents well.
Some interesting points on this book for me:
1. In my opinion, this book has pristine des
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GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL: THE FATES OF HUMAN SOCIETIES BY JARED DIAMOND: This is one of those books that takes you a while to read -- it's pretty heavy non-fiction -- and yet at the end of it, you feel like Hippocrates, a Muslim scientist, or Leonardo Da Vinci must have felt at the realization of a great discovery. The Eureka! moment. This book is kind of like the movie Hotel Rwanda: the movie was life-altering for me, and just made every other movie that came out that year seem tawdry and unimpor ...more
Germ Guns & Steel
It is a thesis,
His thesis being; that all animals are created equal… but not all animals sleep in a bed with sheets.
Why?
Because in addition to needing tree for wood to make looms, herders to shear sheep & weavers to make sheets, you also need (DHU) SHEEP.
Yep, if you are unlucky enough to be born on a continent or onto part of a continent with only anteaters, there is no fucking way you are going to get sheets, no matter how smart you are.
All well and good…but not so very readabl
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In the end I have found this book a bit difficult to write about. It is interesting in that it has gone into areas that I have never really considered. Would I have given thought that the ability to domesticate plants and animals was a consideration when thinking of the continental differences between the east west axis of Eurasia compared to the north south divide in both the Americas and Africa? Probably not.
I suppose in the end this is a book that is more based on the environment of peoples
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“History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.”
What do Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama and Francisco Pizarro have in common? Apart from their status as European countrymen, it was the fortuitous confluence of guns, microbes and steel technology which all but ensured their success at colonizing regions occupied by peoples who lacked such historical fulcrums. It shoul
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