Rating: 
Summary: Well worth a read. Abandon any prejudice before you start.
Review: To the average reader -- not professionally prepared on the subject of human history -- this book is a treasure.
Of course, it needs to be read without prejudice or preconceived ideas, be these on race or religious supremacy or history.To me, it answered questions which I had always wanted answered, and gave me a much more realistic perspective on history. Yes, history didn't start in AD 1, nor in 1492. We all know that, although many don't seem to have actually assimilated the idea. History started well before then and the present is inextricably linked with what happened tens of thousands of years ago. This book helps you to think that way. Furthermore the work is a goldmine of scientific information on plants, languages, animal domestication, etc.
Here I learned that horses didn't exist in the Americas before 1492, for example. And here I learned that zebras cannot be domesticated. Why not 5 stars then? Because the author is not as good a writer as he is a man of science. Arguments are often repeated and -- although maybe this achieves the result of fixing them more in the readers memory -- the book at times seems longer than it could be.
Apart from this minor problem, top marks to Guns Germs and Steel.
Rating: 
Summary: Childlike Idiocy
Review: If east-west trade routes and available plant and animal life were all there were to it, why civilization should have risen in Europe a billion years earlier!
When other civilizations have accomplished something there has been no great shame in admitting it and no great cries as to why they had to have been first, given their geography and no other reason. But if Mr. Diamond didn't feel he had to create a mythical monster racist race then his book wouldn't even have a reason to exist. He creates both the monster and the dreaded answer to the monster - neither of which even exist except for purposes of his own secret agenda, which is the clear favoratism he shows towards non-white races.
This book is a complete work of fiction by a sick and perverted mind and has no relationship to actuality. Isn't the veiled accusations he makes in regards to the opinions of one certain race, the exact definition of racism? No, if you want to see the opinions of racism, you need look no further than this book.
He is correct that intelligence had nothing to do with the rise of the west - the best minds on earth fleeing savagery and ignorance to come live in the west is what had to do with it, not his childlike idiocy in regards to animal and plant life and trade routes. Nor his mythical accusation of race-wide racism, said accusation based solely of course, on their hated race.
Rating: 
Summary: Mad Cow U.S.A.
Review: My word, New Guinea is fruitful when it comes to research! The year is now 1955 and Dr. Gajdusek is about to receive the Nobel prize for discovering mad cow disease in humans for the first time. The New Guinea people call the disease 'kuru'.
His co-researcher Dr. Zigas states, "Oh, blinded and made halt of mind! By the cruel doctrine of racial prejudice!" For he had been told that the New Guinea natives were savage cannibals.
He found instead, however, that they were remarkably friendly and charmingly free of the inhibitions that afflicted the Europeans. Their customary greeting was considerably more intimate than a handshake: a standing embrace in which both men and women handled each other's genitals.
"Even in the villages, among people who saw one another every day, hands were continually reaching out to caress a thigh, arms, and searching mouths hung over a child's lips or nuzzled a baby's peewee."
But back to Dr. Gajdusek. As he moved about in the eastern Highlands of New Guinea, which comprised several thousand square miles of largely uncharted, mountainous terrain inhabited by warring tribes of cannibals, he discovered that the people believed that sorcerers could cast spells by stealing items intimately associated with their intended victims - their excrement or leftover scraps of food - binding it up in a 'magic bundle' with special pieces of bark, twigs and leaves, and burying it to the accompaniment of a chanted curse. They punished suspected sorcerers with a ritual revenge called 'tukabu' - brutal murderous beatings, bashing in heads and crushing genitals with stones and wooden clubs. Since the disease kuru was taking so many lives, suspicions were causing even more deaths unfortunately by ritual murder.
Since more women and children came down with kuru than men, eventually it was realized that there were important differences in the way men and women practiced cannibalism. Although older widows often attended the funerals of people to whom they were only distantly related, joining in the mourning rituals so they could catch a bite of the deceased afterwards, men rarely joined in the feast and when they did, they ate all the good parts, leaving the women and children only with the brains and other internal organs.
These discoveries, of course, led to the recognition of the first cases of mad cow disease in humans and the Nobel prize.
Rating:
Summary: A must read for any history buff.
Review: An excellent read. Well researched, and thought out. The only weak spot is the explanation of why China fell behind the west.
Rating:
Summary: You have to READ this book...not read it
Review: There is a difference between "READING a book" and "reading a book." If you "READ" a book, you think about it and get into it. If you "read" a book (as most of the 1 star reviewers OBVIOUSLY did) you lemming along through it without putting thought into it. If all you do is "read" a book, save your money. If you "READ" books...SPEND IT HERE!!! Does Diamond provide LOTS of data about geograpy, agriculture, etc.? Yes, he does. He creates a book and theory that is based on SCIENTIFIC FACT. We need SO MUCH MORE of this in society, & I'm glad Diamond has done it. Here are the basic questions that Diamond addresses...LOTS of data suggest that humans were in Africa LONG before Europe, Asia, America, etc. The technology of farming and animal domestication began there THOUSANDS of years before America, Europe, etc. So why did Europe rise up and begin to dominate the world? With such a head start, why didn't Africa take the next step? Why didn't they develop steel, guns, advanced navigation, etc. Why are MOST of the names we rattle off (Newton, Einstein, Copernicus, Caesar, etc.) as the most amazing people in history of some type of European origin? Why didn't the Mayans, Incas, Aztecs, or Aboriginies take the steps that Europe took? What happenend? Why did they stop? Again, VERY interesting book actually based on science that provides a logical answer to some of these questions, and like ANY good scientist, Diamond admits, IMMEDIATELY, that there is NO definite answer to this question, but this is what the data suggest. Highly recommed this if you are ready to think about why the world is the way it is. Forget the obvious things you know. ANY army with guns will eventually beat ANY army that only has clubs...forget that, but try to think about WHY did Spain have guns & the Incas didn't. What kept them from taking that step. So, READ this book, think about it, and excerise your ability to make logical connections.
Rating:
Summary: Important but sluggish
Review: This is an excellent book in the sense that it imparts
important information about why western culture dominates the
world. Much of it is just the luck of geography not any kind
of inherent superiority. Now half way through the book I feel
like it needs to just end. I get the point. Why another 300
pages? In feel the book reads very sluggishly like a history text. The first part was interesting but the middle really
drags with unintersting information.
The book is chock full of facts and details. For an almost
opposite tone (little details and mostly well supported generalizations but great reading) I suggest Robert Wright's
Nonzero. This books feels like the reference section for Wright's
though the are really books with different theses.
Rating:
Summary: A Blend of History and Science
Review: This is an excelent book and I would recommend it to anyone who likes history or wants to know why the world is the way it is today. This book attempts to answer the question, Why are some cultures so technologically advanced while others are still living as hunter-gatherers. Or, as he puts it, why Europeans "discovered" America and not the other way around. I often asked myself this question and now I know. This book ties together so many different fields of study, it's just incredible. It must have taken years of study to compile this much info. Knowledge from each field is used to support ideas from another to build up a very strong theory of why some parts of the world are so far advanced (technologically) than others, even though hunter-gatherers are as smart (or smarter) than anyone else.
Rating:
Summary: Sheds a new perspective on human civilization...
Review: I picked this up sometime ago, after it was recommended to aspiring authors by Orson Scott Card in his book "Shadow of the Hegemon". I found Diamond's thoughts and logic to be very insightful and intelligent. He makes a point and then backs it up with several detailed examples in history to support his thesis. His writing also makes for fairly easy reading. It is clear and logical, with a natural progression leading from point to point as he traces the development of peoples from cave to modern man.... After reading "Guns, Germs and Steel", I think I have a much better understanding of human history. That in itself, is as high a compliment as I can pay any book.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating and highly readable
Review: The author undertakes to explain why Europeans and Asians (especially the former) came to dominate the world instead of Africans, New Guineans or other cultures. Diamond has a scientific backgroud and includes lots of data to support his thesis that geography (not innate abilities or cultures) was the primary factor. But this book doesn't make an open-and-shut, scientific case for Diamond's position -- a fact he acknowledges in his epilogue by urging further scientific research. Nonetheless, Diamond makes a good case that in general, geographic access to the opportunity for food production led to denser populations, which led to the disease-resistance, weapons production and scientific advances that made conquest of other societies possible. Some of Diamond's conclusions are supported better than others. For example, he dismisses in one paragraph research claiming that some races are more intelligent then others, then goes on to claim based entirely on anecdotal evidence and speculation that the average New Guinean is more intelligent than the average American. Diamond also concludes several times that remarkable historical figures could not have changed the inevitable rise of societies blessed with geographic advantages. But later he attributes the Chinese people's failure to reach the western Americas almost entirely to a single political decision to end shipping. Despite these flaws, more obvious in some chapters than others, Diamond has done an excellent job to explain why world history turned out the way it did. He condenses an extensive amount of data into a lucid, readable argument for his position.
Rating:
Summary: My Friends, The New Guinea Headhunters
Review: The year was 1901 and although the ideas and impressions I will now relate will soon become "outdated" I couldn't help but be impressed by the large intelligence being demonstrated by my New Guinea guide as he found his way through some wild shrubs.
Let me tell you exactly what my friend was like - His hair was shaven well back from the forehaead and his face and body painted brick red and picked out with markings in white, black and yellow. A long nasal shell was thrust through the septum of his nose and a fine cassowary feather head-dress adorned his head. Guantlets of plaited cane, decorated with cowrie shells and white feathers, were fastened to his arms and legs, and a bark belt fitted around his body with a white, triangular, pubic shell hanging from it.
Still, I couldn't help but admire the intelligent way he could tell the correct shrub from the incorrect shrub, it was stunning really and proof to me that these people would soon take their rightful part in the white man's world and at a very high level.
He asked if I might not like to enter his tribe's great house, or 'mene'.
Beneath the fierce looking figure of Iriwaki, a veil of raffia-like fibres hid the interior of the mene which was about fifty feet tall at the highest point of a sharply sloping roof. To both the right and left of the entrance, in front of shields and totems cut from canoe wood, were the skulls of pigs and crocodiles, while above the shields, rows of pigeon holes had been constructed from the midrib of sago palms. In each of these was a human skull: most had been painted and worked up with clay or bees-wax and given eyes of cowrie shells so they looked like hideous faces.
I was again drawn to the unbelievable intelligence of my host. A couple of days ago I had given him a message written on a piece of bark to relay to my wife. Upon his return, he had rushed off to a large group of his friends, waving the slither of wood. "Look what the white man has done," he shouted. "See this wood: he made it talk! I took it up the hill and it told his woman everything. It talked!"
Since it was his wedding day, the 'buguru' was reaching a climax and each man in the village was compelled to take my host's new wife, each making a gift of an armshell or necklace or some tobacco in return for her favors.
Just then, to my horror, I realized that the great men's house, or dubu-daimo had just been completed - for such places were often dedicated with the blood of human victims, the slain bodies of which were dragged along their length. The New Guinea natives then commenced to club spear and stab to death my entire party.
At once the clothes were stripped and the heads cut off. Braves dragged out the headless bodies and began to cut them up as women and girls rushed from their houses to carry off the cut up pieces to roast on fires for a cannibal feast.
I don't know why they spared me, but I was once asked how many converts to Christianity I had made while in New Guinea, for I was a missionary, and I replied, "Converts? None. But if we can reduce the appalling infant mortality and induce them to adopt some of the rudimentary rules of sanitation; and generally make them happier and healthier natives, our work will not be in vain."
I didn't yet realize then, of course, that my native guide was hiding the native intelligence of Albert E. Einstein beneath his shaven and painted head! That is until Mr. Jared Diamond revealed it a mere hundred years from now.
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