Rating: Summary: biased Review: Those of us not expert in history or the sciences are at the mercy of the writer of books of this sort. Much of it sounds very convincing, but when I read on page 19 that assumptions of racial superiority (when held by westerners) are loathsome and then the author goes on at some length to explain why he feels New Guineans are more intelligent than westerners, even providing a genetic explaination, I have to wonder if some politically-correct assumptions aren't at work. He winds up this section on page 22 with "Why did New Guineans wind up technologically primitive, despite what I believe to be their superior intelligence?" Though there is undoubtably much truth in this book, the less-than-objective admission and puzzling double standard at the beginning don't lead me to fully trust the author.
Rating: Summary: Thought provoking from 90 miles up Review: The book itself is presented as a broad overview of history, as it would be impossible to paint an accurate portrayal of civilization in a book this size. I'm not well enough versed in history, or biology to make an authoritative judgement as to the validity of the material presented. However if you are looking for something to make you think about the rise of western civilization, this may be it. I read this a couple of years ago now and find that the ideas presented in the book still influence my thoughts. Definitely a worthwhile read. I'm only rating it 4 stars because I feel that some of the arguments aren't sufficiently fleshed out.
Rating: Summary: Good for all types of readers. Review: I read this book purely for pleasure, unlike a lot of people I know who have read it for class or as part of an academic exercise. I simply like to pick a book that will challenge me in between fiction books. This book did not disappoint. This is a rare work in that it can appeal to academics and pleasure readers. The knowledge and research behind the concepts in the book are complex and detailed, but Diamond does such an excellent job of explaining things, that you can easily sometimes forget the vast amount of information that he had to assimilate in order to put forth this hypothesis. There are also two main points from the book that I took. One is the merely academic and scientific data that you learn from the book. I do not have a science, anthropologic, or linguistic background, so I learned a great deal from this book. But secondly, there is a very clear goal of this book to discount the foundations of racism. This is a lesson that every reader from this book can take with them and actually use in real life. I was struck at how this book can have such a dual purpose, and this makes it truly unique in my opinion. Sure, there are vast generalizations that are made in a work such as this, just as there are in any history book, but this book has excellent points, is well researched, and makes solid arguments. I would definitely read another book by Jared Diamond and will definitely not forget the lessons I learned in this book.
Rating: Summary: Big civilizations from such little factors Review: Guns, Germs and Steel is not so much a history book as a geography book. Jared Diamond has provided us with a concise and clearly written view of how civilizations get started and some of the factors influencing how they interact. The big question Diamond addresses is why some societies end up having such a large material advantage over others before the two meet.
This is not a trivial issue. There are many factors to consider, as is done here. Despite the title, germs make up a much larger portion of the text than steel or guns. Why is it, one might wonder, that European explorers brought germs to the Americas that wiped out many millions, while they picked up very little that harmed them? We know that European conquest of Africa was delayed for many years by the various tropical diseases found there. Why didn't the same happen in the Amazon, for example? This is not just chance, but rather the result of domestication of large animals (the source of many diseases). There was very little of it in the Americas, but quite a lot in Eurasia. Why? What exactly is involved in domesticating animals? There are thousands of species of potentially the right size to be of use to humans. Why are there only a dozen in domestication? Why are so few in the Americas and none in Australia? On a similar theme, Diamond discusses the rise of agriculture and the development of domesticated plants. Did you ever see corn growing in the wild? Why not? And why did some regions of the world develop many varieties when others developed so few?
The answers, with a bit of science, are not difficult, but they can be surprising. The land area of the Americas, for example, is certainly large and can support large populations. Why didn't farming catch on more? A reason is its orientation, running largely from north to south. One can plant roughly the same crops from Spain to China, continuously over the land, but not from Alaska to Patagonia. There are too many climate changes along the way. So little ideas never spread far enough to become big ideas.
These sorts of analyses are what make up the book. In a non-mobile society, which most of the Earth was until very recent times, different peoples can develop many very different ways of living based on their environment, and though each is suited for their own situation, one can be very much better for winning conflicts when they clash. This does not imply that the flow of history is deterministic. Indeed, the history of agriculture and technology must surely be filled with false starts that never quite got going, ideas that never spread because of chance and back luck. But over such long time spans as millennia patterns will develop and spread. The starting material, the land and climate and raw materials available, shows a remarkable correlation with the later strengths of societies that develop with them. This process makes up the story of the excellently written Guns, Germs and Steel.
Rating: Summary: Wonderfully entertaining and thought-provoking Review: I listened to the audiobook version in my car and I enjoyed it so much that I often found myself sitting in the parking lot of my destination listening for ten more minutes.
Diamond has a way of analyzing history that is both thorough and ingenious. Normally I absoluetely hate history lessons, but this book is in a league of its own. It has sparked my interest in all of the topics that Diamond covered and has left me thinking about them every day. I am going to listen to this one again, probably buy the book, and then listen to the sequel, "Collapse."
All those critics giving it bad reviews are used to the typical boring history lessons that are so detailed your head will spin--if you don't fall asleep.
If you are even mildly interested in exercising your brain cells, get this book.
Rating: Summary: Spotlight Reviews are decidedly wrong Review: Christopher Smith is incorrect in his description of Diamond's work. First, Diamond does NOT reject the influence of culture and human decisions on the fates of societies. This is discussed at length in the Epilogue.
Second, and worse, is that clearly Smith either did not read the book carefully, or perhaps is overlaying his own preconceived notions on Diamond's theses. To wit, the example quoted regarding Sowell's work misses Diamond's point completely: trying to determine ultimate causes, not proximate ones. Why did the Europeans have interesting technology and ideas to exchange with each other in the first place? Simply put, you need an agrarian society with sufficient food surplus to promote specialization. Without that the mere presence of rivers is not magically going to result in technological innovation - and there are enough river systems in the Americas, for example, to counter such a hypothesis.
Diamond's thesis might seem simplistic to some - to this reader, a scientist by persuasion, on the contrary it is a relief to finally see Occam's Razor being wielded with such precision on a topic much muddied by the social "scientists". The objections raised regarding "other factors" sound similar to those always raised whenever a clean, self-contained and coherent scientific theory has been presented - and not surprisingly it is usually the non-scientists who tend to disagree with such theories, pecking away at them with irrelevant "counter-examples". (Witness the whole evolution "controversy".)
What is perhaps most surprising about the negative reviews is the claim that Diamond's book is discounting the achievements of European civilisations - this misses the whole raison d'etre for the book: Why did European societies become and achieve what they did? What was the ULTIMATE cause since at one point in time clearly no particular group had much of an intrinsic advantage over the other? One explanation of course is genetics which seems to becoming more and more laughable as most of the West's universities, research institutes, and tech companies are being more and more manned by non-whites. (Maybe all the Chinese, Indians and other groups mutated in the last 30 years?)
My suggestion to readers reading these reviews is simple: keep asking WHY? For each of the putative refutations of Diamond's book, the question "but why?" can be rather illuminating. That is precisely what this book does.
Rating: Summary: Stimulating & thought-provoking. Review: Try not to be put off by the title; yes, they do feature prominently in the book, but that is not the basic thrust of Mr. Diamond's excellent book.
This is more about how equally intelligent 'tribes' of the same species came to differ so greatly in their development, and ultimately why one faction now pulls the strings of the world.
To examine this in the correct perspective, Mr Diamond goes to the dawn of pre-history, asks the questions a child might ask, then attempts to answer them as convincingly as possible by drawing on the vast resources of available data and his own formidable intellect. Strangely, this doesn't result in a dry-as-dust treatise you might find in Nature journal, but in a highly enjoyable, thought-provoking read, illustrated by many little-known factual historical events. Many of the chapters did appear in Nature, as it happens, but the reasoned logic and step-by-step arguments make this as accessible and readable for the lay reader as the academic. The chapters on how and why our food came to be domesticated are particularly llluminating.
Naturally, in a book of such scope, there remain many unanswered questions, but surely this will stimulate much more debate and research - at the same time correcting some long-held racist dogma.
An excellent read. *****
Rating: Summary: Comprehensive History of the origin of everybody Review: Mr. Diamond is a very entertaining writer, and he is pretty smart to boot. This book is pretty ambitious - it attempts to explain why different populations turned out differently. I think he does a great job of outlining factors that contribute to the rise of major civilizations.
No granted, his analysis is not 100% accurate - it really couldn't be, given the breadth he is trying to tackle, but each chapter really gives you some stuff to chew on. Particularly interesting is the way different science fields all contribute to the understanding of how things started (e.g. how grains developed, animals and exinction, etc.).
Worth a read for anyone interesting in ultimate questions.
Rating: Summary: Challenging but fascinating Review: Jared Diamond has given an impressive account of why complex civilizations and technology emerged on the Eurasian continent rather than other locations. Noting that many earlier writers have suggested an innate superiority of the population, he argues persuasively that it was in fact an accident of geography. In essence, as Diamond shows with solid evidence, the earliest civilizations in the Fertile Crescent area (roughly Iraq and parts of Syria) enjoyed unique advantages due to a large number of easily domesticable plants and animals. Domestication of plants and animals spread out from Iraq to other areas both East and West, giving Eurasia a jump start in technology. Technology, population growth, and urbanization interacted and reinforced each other to produce the combination of guns, germs, and steel that ultimately resulted, about 9,000 years later, in Europeans conquering the rest of the world. Along the way, he offers provocative answers to questions such as why European diseases devastated the native populations of the Americas, Polynesia, and Australia, but no diseases from those regions did real damage to European settlers.
I should also note what this book is not, since negative reviewers here and elsewhere seem not to understand it. First, it isn't an explanation of why specifically Western European countries rose to global dominance. This topic is discussed only for a few pages, and only in the epilogue. And even then, the discussion is entirely a contrast of Western Europe vs China. Other outcomes that were at least hypothetically possible, such as global empires arising from India, Japan, or Korea, aren't even discussed, nor is the question of why England thrived for centuries as an imperial power while Spain, with wealthier conquests, rapidly became a hollow shell that merely looked like a powerful empire on the map.
It also isn't an argument that geography is destiny and culture is meaningless. Consider this passage from page 252: "Traditional New Guinea has conservative societies that resist new ways, living side by side with innovative societies that selectively adopt new ways. The result, with the arrival of Western technology, is that the most entreprenuerial societies are now exploiting Western technology to overwhelm their conservative neighbors.... The Chimbu tribe proved especially aggressive in adopting Western technology. When Chimbus saw white settlers planting coffee, they began growing coffee themselves as a cash crop.... In contrast, the Daribi, a neighboring highland people with whom I worked for eight years, are especially conservative and uninterested in new technology. When the first helicopter landed in the Daribi area, they just looked at it and went back to what they had been doing; the Chimbus would have been bargaining to charter it. As a result, Chimbus are now moving into the Daribi area, taking it over for plantations, and reducing the Daribi to working for them."
The above passage illustrates a point with an example from New Guinea. Diamond has lived for many years in New Guinea, performing research largely into bird populations, and has a clear fascination with the place. He starts the book with a question asked by a native New Guinean and a dedication to numerous Guinean friends; he returns there for discussion or examples in almost every chapter. Generally history on this global scale is written from a heavily Eurocentric or perhaps American perspective; Diamond's unique 'New Guineacentric' perspective adds to the appeal of the book.
"Guns, Germs, and Steel" is skillfully written. Certainly it isn't light reading, but it is hard to imagine how a study covering such a broad subject matter, and analyzing in comparable depth, could have been more readable. I strongly recommend this book.
Rating: Summary: Answers to Yali Review: Q:Yali:"Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?"
A:Diamond:"The striking differences between the long-term histories of peoples of the different continents have been due not to innate differences in the peoples themselves but to differences in their environments."
That is a politically correct answer, yet if you read all of the evidence and arguments between the prologue and the epilogue where the question and answer are posed you'll be convinced by Professor Diamond's thesis. This 1997 book won several awards, most notably the Pulitzer in 1998. I was given this book by a grad student acquaintance in the Boston area, read it a half a dozen years ago. At the time, I was also studying the book of Daniel reading about how the world's first empires came to be so by conquest, in Daniel's case, conquering the tribes of Israel and deporting some of the vanquished to Babylon. This secular book added another dimension to my understanding of world history's dynamics in addition to a spiritual/prophetic one. I loved this book because it helped explain a lot of things, made me think.
I've always loved anthropology and this book builds on one of its tenets that societies' key to becoming complex ones was the development of agriculture. With a permanent food supply, population numbers increased, societies increasingly diversified their occupations one of which was waging war. In societies like Papua New Guinea, a small island near Australia, where Yali was a tribal chieftain, most of the inhabitants subsisted as hunter-gatherers not advancing to the next stage of developing agriculture. So knowing that already, I was given a grander view of the advancement of societies by reading this book. Although it's been years since I've read it, I still have the book, and learned many new things from Diamond's creative thinking. As to where he got all of his intellectual cargo, he was born in Boston, probably the most book-buying state of the Union, to a physician father, linguistics teacher mother, and went to school at Harvard and Cambridge. He now teaches Geography in addition to Physiology in California at UCLA.
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