22 January 2021
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
"Diamond has written a book of remarkable scope ... one of the most important and readable works on the human past published in recent years."
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a national bestseller: the global account of the rise of civilization that is also a stunning refutation of ideas of human development based on race.
In this "artful, informative, and delightful" (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. Societies that had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed writing, technology, government, and organized religion—as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war—and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, the Rhone-Poulenc Prize, and the Commonwealth Club of California's Gold Medal
| Title | : | Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies |
| Edition Language | : | English |
| ISBN | : | 9780739467350 |
| Format Type | : |
Readers Also Enjoyed Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
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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...
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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 si...
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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 bi...
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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 b...
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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. Th...
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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, Ger...
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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, ...
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Misleading! The actual title should be Germs, More Germs and a bit about Steel And Guns, but not very much on those last two really...I mean, we want to put Guns first because it's more attention-grab...
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Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Jared DiamondThe book attempts to explain why Eurasian and North African civilizations have survived and conquered others, while arguing against t...
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Stopped on page 88 for the time being, because, man, do people ever suck. We historically sucked. But since humans used to invade other humans' territory and do a lot of killing, at least things have ...