Rating: 
Summary: Crops = Eurasian rule
Review: Before commenting on this book I would like to say something to all those people that consider the European race to be superior: DON'T FORGET THAT IT WAS OUR RACE THAT CREATED THE GREATEST MONSTERS IN HISTORY: HITLER AND STALIN.Now let's come to the book. I've read many of the reviews. Most people found it excellent, but some deplore that it was too PC, or that it focused too much on people that never bothered to develop civilization. For me, it was the first world history book i read that told me so much about extra-Eurasian cultures. The idea that European superiority could have something to do with genetics is in my view completely absurd. Just observe the people around you and tell me: do you really think that they have a superior intellect? I don't think so. If Africans, Asians or Native Americans had the same opportunities to education as Europeans and Whites in general have, they would surely be as performant as we are. Diamond also gives this argument, yet it is true that he spoils it by concluding that New Guineans are more intelligent than people born in civilization. His most important argument (and in my eyes the one that explains most) is the crop argument. The random distribution of "domesticable" crops and animals explains why some people invented agriculture before others. It is obvious that you can't build civilization without farming, and you don't invent farming from one day to the other. People living in the fertile Crescent did have to invent farming because it was almost given to them in a silver plate. They had the greatest choice, so they could pick the crops that gave them most benefits. Other people in other parts of the world did first have to find the crops that allowed farming. Just imagine how to do that in a rainforest where there are millions of different plants, only a few of which allow farming! The same argument counts for domestication of animals. Furthermore, the Mideast is at the crossroads of all trading routes of that time. It linked Africa, East Asia and Europe, more than the Central Asian and European steppes. Finally, one important argument against the racial theory is given in Diamonds book, but seems to have passed unnoticed by most readers. In the second or third chapter (i don't remeber which), Diamond presents the different evolutions in Polynesia. If race had played a role, all Polynesians would have evolved in the same way. Yet that was not the case at all. Some Polynesians (on the Chatham islands, for example), became hunter-gatherers again. Others maintained farming, but did not evolve. Others started to create empires (Hawaii and Tonga). The Easter island developped writing and build the famous Moai. All this was mostly due to geography: depending on which island they settled, Polynesians evolved differently, even though previously they had shared the same level of development. Atolls and other unferile islands developped hunter-gatherers;fertile ones allowed agriculture, volcanic ones allowed buildings and monuments made of stone, minerally rich ones (new Zealand) created a war culture, and the ones most blessed allowed empires (especially Hawaii).If that's not an example of how geography, and not race, shapes history, then I'll go and live in New Guinea.
Rating:
Summary: Must-read for students of history
Review: Here's one of the reasons I love this book so much: one4time from Asheville, North Carolina confronts the first and only solid refutation of racism as implied by history, and finds it incompatible with his own racist convictions. *(of course, just as a side note, his specific arguments hold no weight when you add the factor of time. It is based on the fact that whites today are generally more successful than other races. however, it wouldn't hold up to the test of time: 1,000 years ago, the opposite would be true. he would be asking: "if whites are not biologically inferior to Muslims and Africans, then how come middle eastern and North African Civilizations are superior to white ones? Even Muslims living in Spain, a European country, have a higher standard of living and greater cities than Christians living in Spain". Who knows how his argument will hold up 1,000 years from now) I'm sorry to have to be so frank, but unfortunately today, too many people in all societies of the world study only the history of the past 500 years from Western textbooks, where the rise of White Civilization (put into euphemisms such as "European" or "Western") came to dominate and humiliate all other world civilizations through superior-well, everything, especially after 1800. Once again, sorry to be so blunt. Rather than be put into the context of 40,000 years of human history and 10,000 years of human civilization, schools around the United States teach the past 500 years (the exact period of time that 'the West' was on the rise) as the entire bulk of modern world history. Not surprisingly, any serious student of history today would be led to suspect at first (with the exception of Japan), that all nonwhite peoples were somehow inferior, especially African & Native American peoples but not excluding all other nonwhites. Any semiserious student of politics AND history would ponder, given all the anti-racist rhetoric in society today, why white civilization suddenly came to dominate all the other ones and why white scientists seemed to come up with all the inventions, from Pythagoreas to Einstein. This book goes a great deal at providing a much-needed explanation for people whose only other alternative would be private racism, a conviction that nonwhite civilizations failed because the people who composed these places were biologically inferior. It is not surprising that many people reject Jared Diamond viciously, because his book is revolutionary.
Rating: 
Summary: An Interesting Theory, but.....
Review: In his book 'Guns, Germs and Steel' Jared Diamond offers a 'geographic determinist' view of world history with the specific intent of repudiating any notion that 'race' might be a factor in the development of advanced civilizations. He argues that the descendants of Europeans and Asians now dominate the earth economically, politically and technologically because of favorable geographic and environmental conditions that existed over 10,000 years ago in Europe and Asia, as opposed to Africa, Australia and the Americas. In his quest to discover the 'ultimate' causes of the current alignment of world power (e.g., why did Europeans settle the Americas and not vice-versa; why did Europeans and Asians advance technologically and not the Africans or Native Americans)Diamond posits that it can all be explained by the fact that Europe and Asia had the benefits of lands that could grow abundant crops and large animals that could be domesticated, whereas other areas of the earth did not have these benefits. Accordingly, these 'Eurasians' had a head start on producing crops that could feed large numbers of people, which then gave way to new technologies (guns and steel) which, along with germs that were deadly to Native Americans, allowed the 'Eurasians' to dominate the rest of the earth's inhabitants. I found the following problems with this book: Diamond presents an interesting and reasonable argument, but much of it seems to be theoretical. Despite the fact that he is making many educated guesses to substantiate his theories, he routinely seeks to give his statements the cover of authority by prefacing his views with words like 'undoubtedly', 'surely' or 'must have'. Watch out for those. Diamond ruins his intriguing theory by his political correctness. He dismisses biological theories about why some civilizations are more advanced than others, but he doesn't tell us why they should be dismissed. It sometimes seems as though he had a conclusion and then went in search of 'facts' to support that conclusion. Some of Diamond's agruments are too convenient. For example, he argues that China's geography and environment were just right for allowing its advanced civilization to develop, but later argues that China's failure to explore and settle other parts of the world was also due to its geography and environment. Is he forcing history into his theory? He says there is no evidence that any race of people is smarter than another, and then tells us that the people of New Guinea are actually more intelligent than Westerners. Where did that come from? Diamond fails to address the 'ultimate' cause of why, at the dawn of civilization, certain peoples were living in geographical areas favorable for the development of civilization, and others were not. Was it not a process of the smarter/stronger people forcing out/keeping out the less intelligent/weaker people? And, since this would have occurred before the development of agriculture, animal domestication or technology that would give the local inhabitants an advantage over others, to what do we attribute the ability of a people to inhabit and protect a fertile living area suitable for the development of a civilization, while others were forced to live in marginal areas? Diamond shows his PC throughout his book by putting words like 'discovered', 'explorer' and 'civilization' in quotes whenever writing about Westerners. He also routinely refers to the process of whites settling the New World as involving 'killing' or 'murdering' the natives, but similar settling processes by third world peoples are simply a 'displacing' or 'engulfing' of the natives. Diamond asserts that all religions developed as a means for the elite to gain power and control the people...no mention of the possibility of a sincere desire to insitute morality, or, heaven forbid, that anyone actually believed in their religion... Most troubling is Diamond's almost total exclusion of the human element from his theory of history. Like a good scientist (Diamond's specialty is bird evolution) he seeks to reduce all history down to an equation without the human variable to distort the process. Diamond doesn't get around to mentioning the possible human variables until page 417 of his 425 page book. In Diamond's view, humans are slightly more than automatons; one individual or group is interchangeable with any other; if all groups of people had been switched around so that 10,000 years ago they all lived on different continents, the world would be exactly the same today, except that the people we know as Africans and Native Americans would dominate the world. The general theory about the strong influence of geography and the environment on the development of civilizations has long been accepted. What is not accepted is the notion that geography and the environment are the primary determinants of human progress. As Will Durant wrote in 'The Lessons of History', after noting the importance of geography in history: 'The character and contour of a terrain may offer opportunities for agriculture, mining, or trade, but only the imagination and initiative of leaders, and the hardy industry of followers, can transform the possibilities into fact; and only a similar combination (as in Israel today) can make a culture take form over a thousand natural obstacles. Man, not the earth makes civilization.' I give this book a partial recommendation; the theory about the impact of geography and the environment on the development of civilizations has validity, but not nearly to the degree asserted by Diamond. Diamond's eagerness to prove his thesis caused him to ignore some important questions and facts and also caused him to make too many unwarranted assumptions.
Rating: 
Summary: The Greatest Hoax of the 20th Century
Review: With a growing body of scientific literature citing possible mental differences between the races, Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel seeks to put the race-genie back in the bottle by offering a positive account for the disparate achievement of races in terms of geography. Thus, Diamond takes an immediate step in the wrong direction. Rather than trying to explain human culture in terms of human biology, he dismisses any such notion as "loathsome", and proceeds to tell us that geography is the one and only factor for the rise of the West in art, science, literature and the rest of the panoply of modernity. In other words, don't credit Shakespeare for King Lear or Newton for Calculus, credit the barley and oats, the fertile land and bountiful hills they lived in. Despite the implausibility of such a theory, Diamond's book is much more cogent than other egalitarian tracts like the Mismeasure of Man and the History and Geography of Human Genes since it has a definite thesis with clear and useful implications. Unfortunately for Diamond this is also his undoing, since the racialist worldview can account for much more of the empirical world than the geographic thesis can. In the final chapter of his book Diamond states, in no uncertain terms, that if any other group had been similarly situated in Europe they would have gone on to replicate the achievements of the Caucasoid race. It is my contention that this claim is untenable and should be abandoned in favor of the racialist thesis. Refuting Diamond's thesis does not require pointing out any factual inaccuracies in the work, anymore than challenging the Marxian interpretation of history requires denying that the feudal system gave way to an industrial one. The hallmark of a scientific theory lies in its predictive value and to the extent Theory A explains less than Theory B puts Theory A into question. The scientific method follows the logic of Ockham's razor which impels us toward clarity and simplicity. In summing the idea of Ockham's razor Frederick Copleston offers a useful illustration: "That it is by experience that we come to know that one thing is the cause of another is, of course, a common-sense position. So, for the matter of that, is Ockham's idea of the test which should be applied in order to ascertain whether A, B, or C is the cause of D or whether we have to accept a plurality of causes. If we find that when A is present D always follows, even when B and C are absent, and that when B and C are present but A is absent D never follows, we must take it that A is the cause of D." Good. Now, let's make the example more concrete and assign values to the variables, so let A (genes), B (geography), C (political discrimination, and D (observed race differences). It is now a simple empirical test to see if observed race differences are due to A, B, or C. A few obsevations are in order: 1) Africa is the poorest part of the planet, has high infant mortality rates, loose pair-bonding and no history of intellectual achievement or sustainable civilization. Africans who live in the United States also have high infant mortality rates, loose pair-bonding, high poverty rates, and are virtually absent in jobs requiring technical knowledge. 2) Europeans who live in the United States are wealthy, tend to have stable marriages, commit few crimes, and constitute the bulk of intellectual achievement in the arts, sciences and literature. Since the United States does not have the geography of either Europe or Africa, why do the identical traits characteristic of Europeans and Africans persist? 3) During the late 18th century Haiti was one of the richest parts of the new world. The French had installed roads, bridges, an irrigation system and was one of the the principal trading partners in the Caribbean. After a mulatto led rebellion in 1804 Haiti has been ruled by blacks, and is now the poorest country in the western hemisphere. Haiti is 95% black and has a life-expectancy of 53 years, similar to other African nations like Nigeria. If it is geography that determines the civilization of a people, why did Haiti change so drastically after it came under the management of Africans? Now, which theory has more explanatory power, Diamond's model which predicts that geography largely determines the characer of a people, or the racialist model which claims that biology plays a key role? It is obvious. Consider another realistic scenario: After South Africa continues its policy of bi-racial integration and white flight continues, what will be the result? It is clear what the racialist model predicts (it is happening now), but what does Diamond's model predict? And why? So why should anyone seriously consider Diamond's "scientific" theory when it has no predictive value. And why should anyone reject the racialist model when it retains its explanatory force across continents and time? In accordance with Ockham's razor it is clear that an explanation that appeals to geography or political discrimination is illogical and unscientific. So until racial egalitarianism is observed or until supporting evidence is forthcoming I will continue to adopt the skeptics credo: I will believe it when I see it. The curtain is down, egalitarianism must rank as the greatest hoax of the 20th century. Somewhere out there Mr. Piltdown Man is laughing at us. :)
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely brilliant insght on 13,000 years of history
Review: Diamond's "Guns,Germs,and stee" is by far one of the best history books I have ever read due to its incorporation of the scientific method. Rather than assume A is immmediately caused by B, Diamond traces with great accuracy the factors that shaped the world in which we live today. This book does a marvelous job of dispelling many racist myths by concluding that the present condition of humanity does not derive from innate differences but arose due to differing environmental factors. This book is very logical. The prologue alone opens the reader's mind to thinking about history in ways in which one has never thought.
Rating: 
Summary: Great ideas, good presentation
Review: Other reviewers have noted that the book is a might repetitive. I share that sentiment. Many of the very unfavorable reviews...criticize Diamond because he "assumes away" or leaves out non-environmental factors like culture, religion, race, etc. These criticisms are seriously misguided and should not affect a purchase decision. The point of the book is to explain an overarching pattern in history. Many explanations can be marshaled for that purpose (race, culture, geography, etc.). Ultimately, we don't know which explanations are true apart from their ability to account for and organize the evidence. If some important factor has been left out of Diamond's account, that oversight would be reflected in an inability to explain the historical pattern -- but this book does not suffer from that inability. Diamond's point is that one does not *need* tenuous (nevermind controversial) references to race, etc., to explain this historical pattern. You can do just fine by only using fairly uncontroversial evidence on geography, crop and livestock distribution, and other environmental factors Diamond employs. In short, what are the minimal and least controversial assumptions we must make to explain this historical pattern? Diamond has a strong case that they are the ones in this book.
Rating: 
Summary: History by Accident
Review: The author tries to explain why some humans failed to develop technology and why those that did develop agriculture overcame those who did not. The author claims that there is no difference between humans and only accidents of geography have led to the current state of affairs. This all politically correct but does not convince me that all humans are interchangable. There is a gradient in all plants and animals. Some a prettier, some are faster and some are smarter. If this were not so, we would have no need for Olympic competitions. The book is written in scholarly way but the premise is flawed.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating topic, repetitive presentation
Review: Diamond's subject and his lucid if plodding prose kept me going despite this books nearly fatal flaw: it is numbingly repetitive. Maybe Diamond expected a few thousand undergraduates to be assigned this or that chapter in isolation and so felt compelled to provide ample context from the rest of the book at every point in each argument he makes. Nevertheless the material covered is so compelling that the book made it onto my Christmas giving list.
Rating:
Summary: too many words chasing too few thoughts
Review: The book's thesis is interesting and by and large persuasive -- humans migrating from the Fertile Crescent came to dominate the world because of dumb luck, not any innate racial superiority. Unfortunately, 90% (or more) of the content of this book would have fit in a Scientific American article. The incessant repetition and the clunky style made it a chore to read. If Diamond is merely synthesizing and popularizing scientific orthodoxy, he should have left it to a competent writer such as James Gleick or Richard Rhodes. If he is appealing over the heads of his peers to the public at large, he should be excommunicated.
Rating:
Summary: Enlightening history of civilization
Review: One of the best books I've read. A compelling, easy to read and substantial work. It includes a very convincing explanation of how some people developed the organization and technology to overpower others.
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