Product Description

This book answers the most obvious, the most important, yet the most difficult question about human history: why history unfolded so differently on different continents. Geography and biography, not race, moulded the contrasting fates of Europeans, Asians, Native Americans, sub-Saharan Africans, and aboriginal Australians. An ambitious synthesis of history, biology, ecology and linguistics, Guns, Germs and Steel is one of the most important and humane works of popular science.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #836 in Books
• Published on: 1998-04-25
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Life isn't fair--here's why: Since 1500, Europeans have, for better and worse, called the tune that the world has danced to. In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond explains the reasons why things worked out that way. It is an elemental question, and Diamond is certainly not the first to ask it. However, he performs a singular service by relying on scientific fact rather than specious theories of European genetic superiority. Diamond, a professor of physiology at UCLA, suggests that the geography of Eurasia was best suited to farming, the domestication of animals and the free flow of information. The more populous cultures that developed as a result had more complex forms of government and communication--and increased resistance to disease. Finally, fragmented Europe harnessed the power of competitive innovation in ways that China did not. (For example, the Europeans used the Chinese invention of gunpowder to create guns and subjugate the New World.) Diamond's book is complex and a bit overwhelming. But the thesis he methodically puts forth--examining the "positive feedback loop" of farming, then domestication, then population density, then innovation, and on and on--makes sense. Written without bias, Guns, Germs, and Steel is good global history.

Observer
'A book of extraordinary vision and confidence'

From the Publisher
Winner of the 1998 Rhone-Poulenc Science Book Prize

Customer Reviews

Get out the red pencil
In many ways, as the other reviewers have noted, this is a remarkably good book. It synthesizes aspects of archaeology, sociology, genetics, history and more to give a coherent account of the rise and fall of human cultures. There are very few howlers, most of the evidence is up-to-date and handled with due caution and he manages to provide a unifying thesis of human history that is comprehensible and almost convincing. More than this, he makes a good stab at trying to map out a research path for historians that aims to put their field on the same footing as other "historical sciences" such as evolutionary biology and cosmology. I don't suppose many historians will leap to follow the lead, but it was a laudable attempt. So why not give such an astounding work of breadth and insight the full five stars?

The answer is: sloppy repetition and over-playing his hand. Diamond's commissioning editor should have been firmer and used the red pencil more vigorously. Over and over again, Diamond repeats great chunks of his text almost verbatim. The effect on the reader, who has got half way through the book and is just getting interested in a new point Diamond is beginning to make, of running into the third or fourth reprise of an argument (complete with evidence and rhetorical touches) on another issue is incredibly frustrating. I can't believe Diamond thinks his readers need the repetition in order to understand his argument. The fact that many of the phrases are repeated exactly suggests to me that He has been just a little careless about proof reading and has failed to delete dozens of relicts of the word-processor's "copy and paste" function.

Second, as several of the other reviewers have noted, Diamond spectacularly fails to demonstrate that his hypothesis accounts for all the data in the case of China. It had the domesticable plants and animals, the population size and density, the climate, access to and East-West aligned continent and so on, just like Europe and the Near East. He acknowledges that the reason for the halting of "progress" in China from the middle ages was purely a cultural one but attempts to explain this by a geographically deterministic argument based on the shape of the two regions' coastlines. I think most readers will find this unconvincing, to say the least.

Finally, in my view, he holds too strongly to the rather discredited wave-of-advance and related models of the displacement of one culture by the movement and expansion of peoples of superior cultures. Until relatively recently, one was very swayed by an interpretation of the available evidence (language distribution, archaeological artefacts, blood group frequencies, racial appearance) to believe that cultural replacement inevitably involved mass migration and genocide. More recent evidence (see, for example, Sykes' "Seven Daughters of Eve") shows that is not always the case at all.

In summary. The second edition of this book, edited to 2/3 its present length, revised to include the latest genetic evidence and with a more honest appraisal of the accidents of cultural difference, will be well worth 5*.

an excellent and enlightening read...
As an A-Level Geography student I found this book a great read- it answered so many questions I had about human civilisation and pre-history using very logical and well-researched arguments. I found myself really enjoying reading it as one by one Mr. Diamond placed the jigsaw pieces together to explain the complexities of human development in a very clear way. Well worth reading, I will be looking at this world and our place in it from a different viewpoint in the future! I would thoroughly recommend it to anyone.

Opened my eyes on Africa
The thought that Africa was the birthplace of modern humans has been one that has always seemed obvious to me, but I had never considered the mass movement of peoples to and from the continent over 1,000s of years. I read with escalating interest and delight Diamond's account of the spread of farming societies through and between the continents. I enjoyed Diamond's conclusion that the major axes of the continents were major factors in determining the speed of development of human populations and societies contained within.

Consider this book a general "big picture" view of pre-history and you'll look at many other subjects with a renewed interest. I feel slightly enlightened and have a compulsion to find out more about contemporary Papua New Guinea.