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Summary: For $8, you can't go wrong
Review: This book investigates 15,000 years of the past to discover why history unfolded the way it did. Why did Europeans develop mercantilism and colonialism? How come the Aztecs didn't do the same thing? Why didn't Africans discover the Americas?The book argues against genetic explanations and other theories that tend to glorify Europeans as some sort of master race. It doesn't condemn Europeans either. The book focuses on the facts and avoids making wholesale generalizations about cultures. The point of the book is not to explain history by virtue of cultural traits. There are plenty of books and popular beliefs that take culture for granted and base all historical events upon it. Guns, Germs, and Steel goes back even further to explain how cultures themselves developed. After all, everyone knows that proto-Europeans were a particularly violent lot. And while other cultures may have been even more violent, they didn't conquer the globe. What causes a culture to become violent and what causes a culture to become technologically savvy enough to sail around the world? This book is a fascinating read and there are much worse ways to spend $8.
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Summary: Further Proof That The Library Really CAN Save You Money
Review: While the premise for Guns, Germs and Steel is interesting and certainly intrigued me enough to buy the book, I found the author pedantic, repetitive and generally uninteresting in his presentation. I was turned off by Diamond's assumption that his reader was not only naive enough to think that the current social/economic position held by Whites represents the pinnacle of modern society (suggesting, in fact, that no one else can usurp this distinction) but that the only way he could effectively convey his theory is through the condescending, over-enunciated manner he chose to use. Had this book been written in a previous time period, Diamond's theory would be useless-- reference the eras dominated by the Huns, Ottomans and even Illyrians of Alexander the Great. Further, every indication of present society leans towards the fact that the changing, integrating face of the world leaves even more doubt that whites will remain the supreme race from which Diamond basis his premise. My main objection to this work, however, remains his tone which is far too supercilious for the product of thought he actually produces. I was turned off by his attempt at being overly academic in his explanations of his theory while at the same time continuously repeating what he was going to tell me. I felt as though I were reading someone's poorly written thesis about a topic no one was really interested in instead of a work that won a Pulitzer Prize. How disappointing. Don't buy this book. If you feel you must read it, save your money and borrow it from the library.
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Summary: A tough read, but worth the time.
Review: If this book had been easier to read, I would have rated it much higher. I have had little exposure in my reading regarding theories as to why one culture developed ahead of another. Guns, Germs, and Steel takes a good run at it. I found the author provocative, stimulating, etc., as it helped me look at our world in a new way. This book, however, is not an easy read, and definitely takes concentration. Read it when you are most alert.
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Summary: Overrated Thesis Ignores Human Variables
Review: In "Guns, Germs and Steel," Jared Diamond argues that the Earth's geography has been the sole determining factor in the evolution and development of all the world's civilisations. In particular, Diamond argues that Europeans and Asians came to dominate the world politically and economically due to their favourable geographic circumstances. Diamond asserts that the people of Europe and Asia had the benefits of highly fertile land and animals that could be domesticated, while the native peoples of Africa, the Pacific and the Americas did not have these assets. As a result, Europeans had a "head start" in the development of their civilisation. Having overcome their agrarian problems by 1500, Europeans used their newly developed "guns" and "steel" along with "germs" to dominate the globe. Thus, issues of race and biology do not explain the course of world history. If African tribes had lived in Europe, says Diamond, it would be they, not Europeans, who would dominate the world today. Needless to say, a legion of grateful left-wing scholars and academics labeled Diamond's book a revelation, and a Pulitzer Prize soon followed. Alas. "Guns, Germs and Steel" testifies why nobody should allow literary awards to influence their book-buying habits. Although Diamond's basic thesis does have some validity, he ignores too many important issues that needed to be discussed. Firstly, Diamond's "geographic" theory is neither "original" nor "revolutionary" as so many have claimed. By arguing that all the world's civilisations were dependent on their geography, Diamond is following a line of reasoning that dates back to Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre's "Annales" school of history. Environmental historians such as Donald Worster have also reiterated the ideas of the "Annales" school in recent times. Diamond certainly recycles these theories admirably enough, but if you are familiar with the work of the above historians, you will find little to appreciate here. Although Diamond's thesis seems coherent enough, much of it is theoretical, and suffers from a lack of concrete evidence to back up his arguments. Instead of material facts, we get highly theoretical "chains of causation" with words such as "surely" and "must have" to provide the connections. One might be able to see how metal implements might develop from fertile lands, but can Newton's theory of Gravitation or Shakespeare's plays be linked directly to the development of metal tools? It is a little difficult to believe. An examination of history also exposes the major flaws of Diamond's case. Between 1500 and 1750, for example, Europe was wracked by continual bouts of famine, disease and economic instability. (See David Fischer "The Great Wave," Jan De Vries "The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis.") But in spite of these titanic problems, European nations began an unprecedented wave of expansion. In addition, the philosophies that made up The Enlightenment also flourished in this period of economic uncertainty. According to Diamond's thesis, none of this could have happened as European farms at the time were in such a precarious state. The fact that these things did occur strongly suggests that there were other factors at work in the development of European civilisation. By contrast, civilisations in tropical regions had ready access to abundant foodstuffs that could grow easily in such a warm climate. Tribes of native North Americans ranged over land that is now considered the most fertile in the world - and yet, none of these civilisations, despite their favourable geography, progressed as European nations did. Diamond also overlooks important issues such as differing cultural prespectives. Between 1400 and 1600, the European depiction of nature underwent a fundamental change. (See Keith Thomas, "Man and the Natural World," Michael Adas, "Machines as the Measure of Men.") In this period, Europeans began to look upon nature as something that must be tamed. Europeans realised that technological innovations could overcome the obstacles of nature and improve lives. Thus, innovation and progress were encouraged by all. By contrast, until the arrival of Europeans, all the other civilisations of the world resigned themselves to the limitations of their environment. African and Pacific civilisations sought to harmonise themselves with nature, rather than try to change it. The people of New Guinea, where Diamond apparently grew up, were no exception to this rule, as Roy Rappaport's "Pigs for the Ancestors" so convincingly shows. Diamond also refuses to take the impact of religion seriously. And yet, the Christian faith, which demanded the "spreading of the gospel" encouraged Europeans to look far afield, while the doctrine of the "civilising mission" was a primary motive for Britain and France in their colonial expansion. Perhaps the overriding problem with "Guns, Germs and Steel" is its political correctness. Human variables such as culture, religion and environmental perspectives have played decisive roles in the development of the world's civilisations. This remains the case today, no matter how politically incorrect it might be to say so. Certainly, geography has played a role in the development of world history, but not to the extent asserted by Diamond. By ignoring the human variables, Diamond has greatly distorted the history of human progress
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Summary: Absolutely Heroic Political Correctness
Review: This book should go into a time capsule. Two hundred years from now, they'll be having a good laugh over this one. I suppose it will be used in colleges to illustrate the heroic lengths to which the people of our age were willing to go to maintain, in the teeth of all common sense, and come what may, the pious dogma that all men are created equal. Political correctness has gotten to the point now that it makes religious fundamentalism look like a shining example of intellectual integrity.
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Summary: The limits of geographical determinism...
Review: As I read it, this book argues that modern imbalances of power between human societies can ultimately be traced to accidents of geography which determined the possibilities for the development of plant and animal domestication, state societies, and culturally stimulating inter-societal contacts such as long-distance trade. Whatever one thinks of that overall thesis, the book does offer much to the reader, both general and specialist, in the way of revelations of unexpected facts. The author integrates much of the latest work on genetics, agricultural history, cultural anthropology, linguistics, archaeology, and other fields and introduces them to the general reader as well as to the over-specialized academic. The thesis functions well as far as it can go. The danger is that, in accepting the book's thesis, the uncritical reader might simply replace "racialist" or "culturalist" explanations for the disparate "fates of human societies" with an excessively "geographical determinist" one. I find convincing overall Diamond's arguments as to why human societies in different continents ("Eurasia[plus North Africa]," "[Sub-Saharan] Africa," "New Guinea," "Australia," and "North/South America) developed differently. He is right to stress the link between the environmental preconditions for the development of human societies, as well as to highlight that epidemic pathogens are as integral to the package of "civilization" as writing, bureaucracy, or high technology and that they are part of the "advantage" which ensured the victory of Eurasian over American, Australian, and certain Oceanic peoples (the last ultimately products of Eurasia and yet through isolation losing the advantages of that heritage). However, the thesis can only go so far, particularly when we consider the imbalances of power between the "Eurasian" societies themselves, which ordinarily command more of the attention of the general reader than the deposition of an Inca emperor or, unfortunately, the dispossession of contemporary Amazonian tribespeople. After spending more than a whole chapter on enumerating the geographical advantages enjoyed by China, Diamond comes up against the problem of China's current subordination to the West. On the one hand, China seems to embody in miniature the geographical virtues of Eurasia as a whole -- a variety of highly productive areas with easy access to each other. On the other hand, by facilitating early and sustained political unification, this particular geography appears, to Diamond as to the geographical determinists from whom he inherits the argument, to have precluded the inter-state competition which promoted technological innovation in Western Europe, whose geography prevents easy unification. If we consider more closely the "conundrum" of why China did not discover Europe when it had treasure fleets of gargantuan junks reaching as far as East Africa in the 15th century, we see that geographical determinism loses its explanatory power at this level of analysis. Diamond, like many Westerners, assumes that "voyages of discovery" are self-evident goods in themselves which will be embarked upon if only the machinations of bureaucracies do not stifle them. Or perhaps that a regional multi-state system will in itself encourage such ventures. These both miss the point about European expansionism. Here the question is not of opportunity (and preconditions) but of motive. The Chinese and other non-Western European Eurasian peoples had no compelling desire to discover the farthest ends of Europe (and needless to say, therefore availed themselves of no chance of stumbling into the Americas), because, among "civilized" areas, Western Europe was marginal to the world economy which was centered in the manufacturing and agricultural powerhouses of China and India and the spiceries of Indonesia. The next less marginal area consisted of the Islamic heartlands of the Middle East (though still far more advanced than Western Europe) which had long reached out towards the wealth of those eastern lands through both conquest, trade, and missionizing in a way which partly foreshadows later European behavior. European expansionism can only be understood in the wider context of the evolving world system and not in terms of its internal dynamics, much less its "unique characteristics." (If we want to talk about the last, we can posit that Western Europe's uniquely combative and competitive stance towards a neighboring -- and fraternal -- civilization, that of Islam, was also a motivating factor in the former's expansionism). The above is not meant to detract from my generally positive appraisal of the book, only to point out the limits beyond which its thesis can no longer be profitably applied. It is unfortunate that Diamond did not take on the IQ-counting, neo-racialists head on, only shooting out provocative statements like "Individual Stone-Age Papuans are smarter on average than individual Internet-Age Americans." I personally do not see anything implausible about such a contention. After all, a person who has no calculator at hand when he solves mathematical problems is likely to be better able to add, subtract, multiply, and divide on his own than someone who always has recourse to such a brain-supplementing, brain-substituting device. A population which has never invented eyeglasses will likely have on average better native eyesight than one in which everyone uses eyeglasses and where natural selection can no longer penalize shortsightedness. These examples just remind us that such things as "intelligence" are as much culturally determined as they are biologically. If a non-modernized Papuan with his particular cultural background made up an intelligence test and administered it to an American, it is likely that the American would not do as well on it as a fellow Papuan. If the "Jews" as a group are "smarter" than other populations, than that is less a sign of inherent genetic superiority than on millennial processes of social (and not strictly natural) selection for the particularly narrow economic niche into which most societies have ghettoized the Jews. Though it falls short of explaining everything in the last 13,000 years, "Guns, Germs, and Steel" does provide us a useful long-term, global perspective from which to reconsider our most pressing questions of inter-societal and intra-societal imbalances of power.
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Summary: Good Theory but Too Long
Review: The author has an excellent theory about why world history took the course it did, with the western world taking control and then subjecting the rest of the world to its ways. It is well thought out and the documentation is excellent. The writing style makes it an easy book to read. The major problem I have with the book is it should have been half as long. Page after page is devoted to sideline discussions and irrelevent facts that are not important to the main theory being presented. I enjoyed the book but the thesis could have been explained and documented in less than 100 pages. Still, the thesis is sound and should have an important impact on historical analysis.
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Summary: A study in probabilities
Review: Forget culture. Forget warfare. Forget race. This author looks at human development from the earliest diaspora out of Africa, and leaves off where traditional history books begin. He makes a compelling thesis that any race that developed in Eurasia would have a leg up on virtually any other group; not by virtue of genetic superiority but through better raw materials. We all know the old adage about "an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters and an infinite amount of time..." The author is suggesting that the combination of open terrain (for the dissemination of knowledge and crops), the presence of large domesticatable mammals, and an abundance of nutritious (and cultivatable) wild crops led to the development of what we would now call "civilization" in Eurasia first. In other words, the number of monkeys (family groups or clans) in any area may be large, but not infinite; the number of typewriters (regional advantages as above) vary by continent or region; and the amount of time available for a civilization to gain a foothold in a region is not consistent. Probability would suggest that the area with the greatest number of "monkeys", the best "typewriters" and the longest head start would finish that mythical work of literature first. It is refreshing for an historian to look at humanity dispassionately and to say that, in the aggregate, humans generally behave in a given way in a given situation, and until fairly recently the acts of a few outliers have been unable to significantly distort these trends. Like it or not, we're basically herd animals. There are some minor logical inconsistencies in the book, but I found it to be fairly thorough and a good read, although a little long on New Guinea.
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Summary: Will stretch your mind and insights leading to knew thoughts
Review: Jared Diamond is a Physiology Professor at UCLA whose passion has been ornithology and who has spent years in New Guinea. He brings the scientists logic and knowledge to answering the question, why do Eurasians represent the most prosperous, powerful elements of mankind if there is no genetic difference and indeed, as Diamond realizes, if there might actually be stronger genetics in some parts of the world that did not develop as rapidly. His answer is a sweeping review of the rise of agriculture, the nature of disease among large populations, the geographic range of domesticatable large mammals (none in sub-Saharan Africa, only the llama in the New World, none in Australia), and the ability of competitive large populations (made possible by the east-west spread of agricultural and cultural knowledge in Eurasia and blocked from moving north and south through different climate zones in Africa and the New World) to both develop more advanced technologies and to build resistance to communicable diseases. Humans outside Europe and Asia lacked the populations to acquire enough communicable diseases to develop resistance to them, lacked the agricultural knowledge to sustain large enough competitive populations to develop technologies (something which was beginning to be overcome in the New World but in isolated centers in the Andes and the Mexico-Central American centers). This is a book whose reasoning will stretch your mind and insights will lead you to knew thoughts. It is definitely worth reading.
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Summary: One of civilization's malcontents rallies for 3rd World.
Review: In short, the author pulls together current archeology and anthropology with ad hoc reasoning to come up with a story to explain the disparities seen in the modern world, rediscovering Marxism in the process. After decades in New Guinea bird-watching, the author writes in the prologue his goal is to explain why "...Europeans, with their likely genetic disadvantage and (in modern times) their developmental disadvantage, end up with much more [material success]. Why did New Guineans wind up technologically primitive, despite what I believe to be their superior intelligence?" The author assesses superior intelligence based on the native's ability to find their way in the jungle, where Europeans find themselves lost. In this way, the uniquely human ability to abstract knowledge symbolically is discarded as a sign of intelligence in favor of finding ones way around a jungle -- an ability found in creatures with microscopic brains. The author says New Guinean's genetic superiority is due to their not being affected by indiscriminate diseases like Europeans. They were naturally selected for intelligence. Specious stuff -- and the book is filled with it. The West obviously dominates encounters with other cultures due to superior technology, organization, etc. This does not yield the right answer, so these are called proximate causes. In order to get the right answer (dumb luck), it is necessary to push the origin of the advantage back 13,000 years into conveniently prehistoric times. The author is up-front with his intentions; one knows from the start the book third world are the same -- or preferably -- better than we are, despite the actual results obtained, evidence of which we see around us generation after generation. At times, the author seems unhappy with civilization. We live in a world dependent on complex systems we don't have the time or ability to understand. If ones feels guilty about seemingly unearned material wealth, its easy to feel (falsely) virtuous by identifying with those who don't have it. One major problem is the author assumes that human history is only a product of economic forces. He speculates whether individuals have any effect on the broad sweep of history before concluding they probably don't. Others who think like this are usually called Marxists. Replace the book's take on aboriginal people with the proletariat and the underlying philosophical assumptions lead in the same direction. The author is probably not a Marxist, just starts with a set of assumptions that lead inevitably to its rediscovery. Marxism has been discredited at tremendous cost, yet keeps popping up to delight Pulitzer Prize committees and PC types in academia. They share interest in pushing the buttons and turning the knobs to direct the automatons that are us toward their perfect society. They have adopted a material-causation worldview at odds with reality; it keeps failing. They don't know why, since they are barely aware of their underlying assumptions (or the alternative is unthinkable). Thus, the same erroneous ideas keeps recycling in different guises, always with the hope the next take will be the guide to man-made Utopia. A different "assumption" one could make is that humans are moral agents who initiate new chains of cause-and-effect without preceding causes. This assumption is supported by most of human history in that people who accept it as true create things of lasting value. It would have resulted in a totally different book. By instead adopting the (failed) materialist model of human history and treating people as automatons responding to economic forces, the author ends up writing a book filled with interesting but often selective facts, linked by irrelevant conclusions that can only mislead people from actual lessons of history. Truth, justice, and fully realized human potential will not be found by romanticizing the desolation of the Third World or by propping up stone-age peoples while denigrating "ourselves". Just the opposite. But there are those who feel a spiritual calling they cannot respond to directly due to their irreligion; they think they find it by taking responsibility for those worse off than themselves. Others just know that if they can turn the whole world into the Third World, it's easier to be "on top". Kings need peasants. It is these two groups for whom this book will click. How else can one explain the dismissal of math, science, philosophy, in favor of "jungle knowledge" as a sign of intelligence?
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