Rating: 
Summary: Stimulating and best of the breed.
Review: A tv interview started me on the Diamond trail. Prose is superb. Stimulating and makes me think. Nice to read some oped pages,..Recommended to all serious readers of science. You will be annoyed.. dick Morley
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Summary: Sweeping review of the reasons for historical inequities
Review: Great book. I was very skeptical at first of Dr. Diamond's ability to cover 13,000 of human history in one book. But like his other books, he brings up great points, that challenge you to think, even at his most speculative. Some chapters are more thought provoking than others, for example the chapter on the Spanish Conquest of Inca Peru, which sort of held the entire concept of the book in one chapter. But overall, you can no longer speak on why some cultures dominate others and have at great historical gain, without referencing this book.
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Summary: A wonderful, wonderful account of history's big picture
Review: I found it refreshing to read something which genuinely attempted to grasp the big picture of history. Ably dismissing the conceited and partisan theories of earlier generations (and of most people living today), Diamond proposes sensible scientific alternatives which carry the ring of truth, and apparently so self-evident that it seems amazing no one thought of them before. He isn't too concerned with the individuals and events which are the backbone of traditional histories. He won't explain why one or other political power in Europe gained the advantage in some situation. These are the fine details of the broader picture - and in a very real sense they don't affect the outcome of history. What Diamond wants to know is, for instance, why a steadfastly stone-age Europe was not colonised by gun-toting Native Americans. His ideas give a kind of tragic certainty to the history that we all know and I suspect that many will try to dismiss them as "cultural determinism", as they have with other authors in this vein. If I have any criticism at all it is that Diamond rather labours the point, but this is not necessarily a bad thing with new and interesting ideas. This is an approach to history of which I would like to see a lot more - I could not put this book down. I have read most of the science books shortlisted for the 1998 Rhone-Poulenc prize and am very glad that this one won. If it is permissible to recommend a companion volume try "Cannibals and Kings" by Marvin Harris.
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Summary: good book, refutes racial superiority
Review: I really liked this book. It gave me great insight into why european civilization has been dominant and particularly why native cultures (especially in the anericas) we mowed down. It wasn't spanish steel and gunpowder but rather spanish germs. The weapons helped the mop up.
Rating:
Summary: Cogent but incomplete account of economic disparities
Review: Diamond's self-confessed mission is to dispel racially deterministic accounts of economic disparity, as well as to aim off culturally deterministic explanations, which he sees as stalking horses for racism. This gets him into diffculties, as he is not always able to stick to his own line: thus, he argues that (eg) Australian Aborigines pursued an optimal developmental course in light of the limits they faced from the lack of domesticable plants and animals; but he also suggests that China's loss of leadership to Europe in the modern era may be explained by its greater centralisation. This is at best inconsistent. It also points up the central failing of the book, as for all that it presents a compelling explanation of the advantages of Eurasia as a cradle of development, it fails to answer "Yali's question", offering little to explain how one rather than another part of Eurasia (ie, Northwestern Europe (and latterly its cultural successor, North America) rather than the Mediterranean, Levant, Indian subcontinent, or China) has prevailed in the last five hundred years and why the character of its dominance has been so overwhelming. Presumably this is because any attempted explanation would take Diamond further down the culturally deterministic road he prefers not to travel. For a powerful answer to the question shirked by Diamond, see "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations", David S Landes, W W Norton, 1998, which takes the strongly "culturist" line which seems to me inescapable.
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Summary: An excellent system for understanding history
Review: Diamond's systematic explanation for the broad course of history provides a construct in which the reader can place all the various pieces of information ever learned about past and present civilizations.
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Summary: Guns, Ambition and Malice: The Fate of Humankind
Review: Is everyone satisfied with patting themselves on the back? All that he explains does not refute the following: Economic and intellectual power cannot be kept without political and military power. When one has ambition and the will (and dirty underwear) to use it, you can subsume the rest. What I think we have experienced up 'till now is the test (over and over) within humanity about whether individuality is economically superior to non-individuality. Egypt had the longest run so far in history for a politico-socio-economic environment. It had to be conquered from the outside. It maintained this length through military power until it was overtaken. Why did it not 'conquer' the world? Is _that_ a measure of a civilization? What about its length in history - _that_ is not a measure of success? All manner of mathematics, the scientific method, literary form, written form (je' ver notice all the icons on Web pages? - look like hieroglyphics to me ;-) oops there's another one) art were invented / promulgated during Egypt's 3500 years (or Meso-America or Asia, or you get the point). Did it fail as a civilization to raise the standard of living of all humans? Maybe... or maybe America is Egypt's reincarnation-all the intellectual and military power plus individualism (not a Egyptian -- Pharonic trait). In any case, many cultures he presents had intellectual capital; but it will do you no good without the power to keep it, harness it, nurture it, and capitalize on it. Again individualistic capitalization is more economically productive of 'stuff' / 'cargo' than group/ government/ nationalistic capitalization (aka Soviet Union, China, Egypt). But we keep it because of military power. Could all us engineers, scientists, doctor, lawyer, writer, technician, nurse, politician, continue to grow and add value with our military giving us the _freedom and time_ to pursue these value-added interests? The 'positive' result of the 'West' is 'stuff' -- materiel. I don't think we've invented any new art, religion, literary ! forms lately; these forms are ancient (well computer art - isn't art). Is human history over? Are we declaring victory? Really? Let's see if the experiment we're all in right now lasts for 2500 more years (without blowing or burning or starving or racially subjugating ourselves into extinction) and then declare victory of the current politico-socio-economic environment. Lucky for us maybe that none of the other cultures had the atom bomb (aka 'stuff', aka 'cargo') before we were ready. Oops, that's right, we used them already. But do we really wish the technological evolution we have now had happened sooner? Pol Pot with an atom bomb? Hitler with one? Kaddafi with one? Caesar with one? The conquistadors with one? Alexander the Great with one? Everyone of us is still bound by this planet. We can barely get 5 people off of it without blowing ourselves up in the process. If the Sun 'novas' or goes supercritical, we're all gone. We green house ourselves to a nice crisp-we're gone. We get hit with a dinosaur sized meteor we're gone. We got much work to do folks before I'm ready to declare history a success.
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Summary: One of the most truely interesting books I've read in years!
Review: For students of the social sciences and teachers alike, it is rare to find a book so wide in breadth and so monumentally couragous in unearthing why our social world is how it is. With a mear few hundred pages, Diamond paints a complex picture of the past 15,000 years in a qualitative manner which draws strongly from holistic vantage point that ushers the reader into a new and exiting paradigm. Diamond is careful not to make sweeping, unqualified assumptions, while at the same time he is successful in bringing together a wide aray of information to prove his point. Both the general interest reader and the experts will enjoy this important book. In an age when the nature nurture debate continues to rage, this author has the ability to move beyond the quibbling to a new understanding of the human animal, and the world we inhabit.
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Summary: Geography drives history, but not evolution. Why?
Review: Diamond thinks that geography and biogeography have been the driving forces in human history, and that they explain why certain ethnic groups have developed technical civilizations and others have not. There has to be a lot of truth in this; but why would this argument suggest that ethnic differences in psychological traits and mental traits cannot exist? Surely the geographic and biogeographic factors he cites would affect human evolution as well. And he _says_ that they do, but, fortunately, only in ways that make New Guineans mentally superior to Europeans. He suggests that the qualities favored by evolution in highland New Guinea have been those that help in inter-human competition, while in Europe resistance to infectious diseases has been more important. If he believes his own argument, parts of the world that have had far higher levels of infectious disease than Europe should be even slower than Europeans; there are such regions, of course. But I'm sure he does not believe this, because it would give the wrong answer. It's important to know the right answer before looking at a problem - otherwise, who knows what might happen!
Rating:
Summary: Among the most interesting books I've read.
Review: The author effectively combines expertise in evolutionary biology with knowledge and experience of anthropology to write a very inciteful book. Covering, in effect, the entire history of our species, he explores why it was that the continent of Eurasia advanced so far beyond the rest of the world by the Age of Discovery. Something of a revival of "environmental determinism" he nevertheless comes up with a convincing arguement.
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