Rating: 
Summary: Geography, not genes
Review: The great question the book tackles is why today's modern world bears the stamp of western society. The answer is partly found in the book's title: the west rules because the west had guns, germs, and steel. Diamond's insight (not in the title) lies in why the west got these before other societies. The answer is surprisingly simple: geography. First, the fertile crescent, located in modern Iraq, held most of the important domesticable large animal and plant species. Second the east-west orientation of the large Eurasian land mass offered a better environment for spreading societies than did north-south orientation of the Americas or the restricted area of Africa and Australia. The east-west orientation means large areas with more or less identical weather in which domesticated plants and animals could be moved, which in turn favoured the spread of farming and other technologies, including writing. The same east-west orientation also enabled diseases to spread easily along with the cattle that often incubated them. The populations of the Eurasian land mass were thus immunized against most diseases while those of less spacious Oceania and north-south America were not. Ultimately the coastal people (e.g. Spain, England) of the Eurasian land mass were favored over the inland people (e.g. Persia) so that only the Europeans and Chinese were left as possible world conquerors. The Europeans went for it, the Chinese did not. The book resorts to an interesting but unconvincing political explanation for this: China was politically stable so had no need to go overseas to build its empire, while the European nations did. This feels like an oversimplification. Nevertheless, the fundamental insight of geography being the determining factor, rather than genetic or racial superiority, into why the world is as it is, makes this an important book destined to remain on reading lists for a long time to come.
Rating: 
Summary: Culturally Significant Book
Review: What processes enabled certain societies to become powerful and innovative? Why did Europeans come to dominate much of the world and the New World? Why did history unfold differently on different continents? These are the questions that this culturally significant work sets out to answer. For the most part the author does a good job. Without going into detail some of the reasons are; the east-west axis orientation of Eurasia as compared to the north-south axis orientation found on other contients like Africa and the Americas, Eurasia's abundance of plants and animals available for domestication as contrasted to the scarcity of them elsewhere, Europeans resistance to germs that were never encountered till modern times by native american peoples, and agriculturally producing societies with dense populations that could support a sedentary lifestyle where people were able to innovate and create new technologies. These explanations for why certain peoples displaced others or why certain peoples such as European colonists who settled Australia were able to form literate agriculturally producing societies in contrast to Aborginies who had been there for 1000s of years and never managed to do it are much better than previous outdated ones. The causes and reasons leading to different histories of different peoples have much more to do with geography and environment as opposed to being caused by innate differences in the peoples themselves. The author has obviously researched the subject in-depth (as far as possible upon him) and presented his findings in several chapters. The chapters take these reasons and expound upon them while offering evidence and showing different chains of causation. I found the book mostly interesting and lively although it read somewhat slow because of the statistics and facts contained throughout. By the time you get to the end of the book you will definitely have the themes of it pounded into your head as the author details them over and over. In my opinion it would have been better to condense redundant details but still a fantastic book that's definitely worth a read. Sometimes I found myself getting a little dulled because in the latter part of the book the author focuses on the expansion of languages and the conclusions we can draw from them as to whom settled where and when. Some of the other parts of the book were a little techincal as well but there were also some fascinating chapters that kept your attention like the ones talking about the Spanish invasion of Incan lands. I recommend this book for its ability to change racist (and incorrect) views of human history and also its ability to enlighten and hopefully educate humans to the point of understanding causes of events and outcomes better. Good read.
Rating:
Summary: Plows, pox, and climate
Review: This book is the beginning of a long and necessary effort to answer the question: Why did Spaniards destroy and/or enslave people in South America --- and not the other way around? It makes sense to generalize and ask, Why did ANY particular group of people consistently dominate another in history? There has already been a lot of research into this topic that centered around intelligence: The Spaniards were smarter, that's why they dominated. But Jared Diamond rejects this conclusion immediately. Based on his experience, he doesn't think the colonizers have bigger or better brains, or higher IQs. So he goes looking for a materialist explanation, searching for the way that climate, crops, and animal domestication led to better immune systems and superior technology. This theoretical stuff isn't a large part of the book. Diamond makes his case briefly and then spends 90% of the book on facts to back it up. And the facts are impressive. Diamond knows a lot about agriculture and animal domestication. He writes about it clearly. The information is important and interesting, which makes the bulk of the book very easy to read. But does he prove his case? Well, obviously you'll have to decide for yourself. Personally, I think he came to his conclusions too quickly. The evidence is very good, but it's simply not enough. That leads me back to the beginning of this review --- this book is the START of a long research project, not the end. Reading this book is very easy, and it's likely to inspire you to read more on the topic. Jared Diamond might not convince you 100% that materialistic factors decided who dominated who, but you can't help but be impressed with the amount of information he's collected to back up his theory. My guess is that the IQ approach will wither away as this book begins to dominate the debate.
Rating: 
Summary: Racial egalitarianism masquerading as science
Review: The timing of this book (1997), the authors obvious commitment to "racial egalitarianism" and the convenient awarding of a coveted Pullitzer Prize - thus guaranteeing huge publicity and sales - lends suspicion that GGS may have been deliberately "commissioned" by the "anti-racist" academic intelligentsia to neutralise the surprising success of the much-loathed "Bell Curve" (1994), a book which could never have been awarded a Pullitzer, given the left-wing bias of that committee. As my title suggests, GGS heavily promotes a left-wing political agenda although this may not have been noticed by the bevy of gushing 5-star reviewers below. Which emphasizes the insidiousness of the PeeCee demand that, in order to appease "turd world" sensitivities, "eurocentric" history and achievements must always be slandered and denigrated - hence the title "Guns, Germs, and Steel", all 3 destructive elements supposedly symbolic of "exploitative" white colonialists. JD establishes his true agenda as early as the 3rd page where he regurgitates the "blame it all on whitey" justification for the spectacular failure of virtually every black African state - "much of Africa is still struggling with its legacies from recent colonialism" - he dutifully proclaims. Then, on page 19 he uses the word "loathsome" to describe those who would dare to consider that the human races are not exactly equal in intellect. And yet, in almost the same breath he contradicts himself by saying "New Guineans impressed me as being more intelligent than Europeans or Americans". Reverse that last statement and, hey presto, Pullitzer disappears in a puff of peecee. The objective of this book is to answer "Yali's Question". Yali was a New Guinean who, whilst strolling on a tropical beach, wondered aloud to JD - "why is it that you whites have so much 'cargo' when us blacks have so little?" JD's 400 page answer is an ingenious and (to the white liberal conscience) convincing attempt to explain away white success whilst avoiding the real reason (superior intellect) and thus remaining faithful to the gospel of innate racial equality. JD labours at great length how Eurasia (as opposed to America and Africa, but especially the latter for obvious reasons) was divinely favoured by the larger size of their grass-seeds, the horizontal shape of their continent(!!!), the number and usefullness of domesticable animals and, (inevitably) how unspeakable white people have raped, pillaged, enslaved, decimated, subjugated, colonised, and exploited dark-skinned races as they unfairly clawed their way to the summit of the human heap. JD is also too fond of silly PeeCee statements such as "the oldest Java 'man' fossils may actually have belonged to a Java woman!" or "Rhino-mounted Bantu shock troops could have overthrown the Roman Empire". All in all he presents an ingenious but ultimately highly contrived case, whilst propping up the intellectual left's fantasy world of absolute and innate racial egalitarianism. The book is certainly a good read and makes interesting points some of which may even be valid, but ultimately his conclusion seems to be "well if whites are smarter than blacks its not because they are genetically superior - its because they were lucky..! If blacks had originated in Europe and whites in Africa, the tables would have been turned..!" A conclusion that could only have been made by a committed racial egalitarian.
Rating:
Summary: Important thesis -- Read It FAST
Review: Here's a synopsis of what the other 600+ review of this book say: 1) The book is revolutionary, important, compelling. Mr. Diamond really makes you think about why the countries of Europe dominated the contest when continents came into contact rather than the other way around. READ IT. 2) His point of view is not the only one that exists. The sweep of his thesis is huge, and other commentators have taken different approaches. For example, Mr. Diamond disclaims any racial or cultural explanations for the broad sweep of history. 3) The book could have been shorter. This is a book that you can "gut" fast if you want to. Speed read. Skip paragraphs or whole pages. Mr. Diamond seems to anticipate that students will be assigned chapters of his book, so he repeats himself in order to make each chapter stand alone reasonably well. Each chapter makes new points, but it also restates old ones. ("Too long" is the complaint of most reviewers who gave this book less than five stars)
Rating:
Summary: A Rationale for World History
Review: I would like to praise Guns Germs and Steel on several aspects. First, as everybody quite agrees on, GGS lays a logical framework for the history of the human species. (second) Diamond wrests this enormous task with seeming ease, although it is obvious that he thoroughly criticised his ideas before writing them down. But we don't read the mind bendings and difficult times he had while doing this self-criticism: we just read the end product, the points he makes, what he accepts, what he refuses. It is as if he wrote a volume that was several times larger than GGS and then he took only the notconfusing crystallized ideas and put into GGS.
His writing style is excellent. He is not self indulgent in using excessive grammar and handsome vocabulary. Even at the most colorful instances in human history he narrates, he doesn't get carried away in the language he uses.
At all chapters, I felt the presence of an author who really thought on the issues he tells, never conceals the facts, never tries to find ways around.
The main idea of the book is awesome, and this is much glorofied anyway (for good reason). I am more struck by the fact that a content this complex and this overwhelming is given in such a good structure. What I observe in myself is while reading a science book, even if I admire the book, when it's finished all I have is an impression of the book and a few examples that I remember. On the contrary, after I finished GGS I found myself talking about the main idea of the book to people for hours. GGS achieves this by the amazing simplicity of its language, its unpretentious style and its repetitions. Yes, repetitions, which is normally regarded as drawbacks becomes a way to make the reader really understand the idea. Certainly, repetitions are not mere repetitions but the main ideas repeated in different contexts. In this aspect, the seemingly high volume of the book also doesn't become an issue because of the ease of reading it.
Rating:
Summary: Overacclaimed
Review: The question asked is: "Why did people from the Eurasian continent conquer the other continents, and not the other way around?" Most people would answer 'because they had guns'. Jared Diamond tries to answer why the Eurasians developed guns. What was the prime reason? Diamond has a couple of intriguingly good points related to geography, points completely new to me: that the size and major axis was decisive of a continent's destiny in the big battle for world supremacy. Because Eurasia was the biggest continent, it was most likely to accommodate the most domesticable plants and big mammals. Eurasia also had the longest east-west axis, meaning that the art of food production spread more easily than in the Americas or Africa, where the major axis were north-south. With food production the value of land increased. People became willing to pay for staying at the same place over a long period of time, and political centralization and professional specialization evolved. Particularly: people with food production developed means to protect their property by force. Political centralization also contributed largely to the development of writing, and a lot of other innovations like metallurgy, large ocean going vessels, compasses, armour, religion etc. The size of Eurasia also meant that if one civilization was in the backwater, another was probably innovative. Ideas spread, and ideas spread more easily between rather similar civilizations. The geographical points are well made. In addition to the geographic points, Diamond spends a lot of time elaborating a biological point: domestication of big mammals led to infectious diseases among the farmers, smallpox being the most important one. After a couple of thousands years the farmers develop resistance towards those diseases. Travelling overseas, the diseases became a lethal weapon in the service of the Europeans, killing far more Indians than guns did. This point is not new, and the importance of germs as a cause of successful European imperialism is large overrated in this book. Firstly, germs impossibly played any significant role in the battles between the 150 Spaniards led by Pizarro and the tens of thousands of Inkas. Guns, armour and horses did. Secondly, Africa was also conquered by Europeans, despite that Africans had as nasty germs as Europe. All this said, reading about the development of germs was interesting enough. Another objection towards his theory is the facts of the immense diversity inside the Eurasian continent. At 1500, Western Europe and China were at the technologically forefront. The areas now covered by Ukraine, Poland, Pakistan, Myanmar and a whole lot of other Eurasian areas were not, despite being at the Eurasian continent. A point he pulls far to often is that the wealth of US, Europe, Australia and Eastern Asia today does not originate from superior genes, but from different environments. A hundred years ago it would have been controversial, today it isn't. The main objection towards the book however, is its length. Diamond has a couple of really good points, and some really good stories to tell (example: the Japanese went from being the worlds finest gunsmiths at 1600 to abandoning guns altogether in 1800). The author didn't have to spend 450 pages getting his admittedly good points through, and he didn't spend that many pages either; the last half is mostly repetitions from the first. Chapter 18 (Hemispheres colliding) is a complete revisit to the earlier chapters. But the first part of the book is a winner, and I am will probably read Diamond's next one as well, about why civilizations fail.
Rating:
Summary: Simple yet profound thesis on how we got here
Review: There are hundreds of reviews on here of this monumental book covering the general thesis and finer details. Suffice to say that the book is extremely powerful and thought provoking. Whether or not one agrees with Diamond's conclusions, they are well-established and inspire critical thought. He has presented some of the simplest answers to questions of monumental historical significance, and the scientific presumption should always be that the simplest answer is most likely correct. While some reviewers slam Diamond as psuedo-Marxist and completely unbalanced, no competing theories of human development are as compelling as his nor as scientifically substantiated to this point.
Rating:
Summary: Breathtaking in its breadth
Review: I originally learned about Guns, Germs, and Steel on the RPG.net forums. It sounded like an excellent book to ground a Game Master or an author on world-building. So I put it on my wish list and last Christmas I received it as a gift. It took me this long to finish reading it, and I'm the better for it. But I put it down after reading one chapter into it. The author, Jared Diamond, explains on page 19 that racist explanations are "loathsome, but also...wrong. Sound evidence for the existence of human differences in intelligence that parallel human differences in technology is lacking." Then he turns around and states, "...modern "Stone Age" peoples are on the average probably more intelligent, not less intelligent, than industrialized peoples. Displaying his bias up front, Diamond states on page 21, "in mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners, and they surely are superior in escaping the devastating developmental disadvantages under which most children in industrialized societies now grow up." There's a few problems with Diamond's arguments, not the least of which is that he spends two pages arguing a point that he has no means of scientifically proving. This is ironic, given his last chapter that talks about a scientific approach to history. It's also telling that Diamond has but one source mentioned in his notes for his argument that New Guineans are smarter than Westerners. On its surface, I don't object to Diamond's bias. It does however, taint his entire argument. It's difficult to take Diamond seriously when he devotes an entire book proving that one society's domination of another is not inherently racist but determined by a wide variety of other factors - but oh yeah, New Guineans are genetically superior. It's like listening to a priest and a die-hard atheist argue - the two are so diametrically polarized, it's difficult to consider either argument as objective. So I put the book down and it sat on my shelf for two months. Then I decided to give Diamond another chance, because some of what he said was intriguing. To whit, Diamond provides evidence that societies excel because of a combination of geographic and societal factors. For example, farming societies can produce more food per square foot than hunting societies. Hunters have to expend energy to carry their children, so too many hinders the tribe. Farmers can stay put and reproduce as well as feed more mouths. As time goes on, farming societies can support politicians. Politicians are better at waging war and organizing peoples than hunters, who will often leave the area and move on to a less dangerous location. Farmers also coexist with domesticated animals. Of particular relevant for world builders are the attributes that make an animal useful for domestication, including diet (food must be easily available), growth rate (they must grow quickly enough to be productive), breed in captivity, benign disposition, not prone to panic, and social structure (herd or pack mentalities allow humans to take roles in the domesticated animals' structure). Animals are important for another reason - by coexisting with them, humans are exposed to a wider variety of diseases earlier than hunters. This is how Europeans ended up plaguing North and South Americans. Geographically, he east-west axis of a continent allows cultures to travel easier across similar terrain as opposed to a north-south continent, which will have a wider variety of climates. This in turn makes it easier to carry foodstuffs and farming. On the opposite extreme, unified societies can be a hindrance. China fell behind modern societies even though it led the world in chemistry, clockworks, exploration, and warfare - all because the ruling classes passed laws to prohibit their development. Conversely, Europe's fragmentation was ripe enough in its diversity to allow good ideas to eventually flourish. Diamond's overview is breathtaking in its breadth and a critical part of our education system. It should be in every child's school texts. It helps dispel, once and for all, the racist notions that pervade common views of history - if only Diamond could keep his own biases out of the book.
Rating:
Summary: What's the fuss?
Review: Wow- it seems like all of the reviewers of this book have been completely polarized. I guess I would rather take the work for what it is worth. What is it worth...?
Well many of the chapters are truly fascinating reads! Almost on the same-page turning numbness as you will find in a good crime novel. However, other chapters are brutally slow, and you can't help but let you mind wander. Religon is virtually ignored for any of his analysis, except that certain religons helped to provide a social framework, which allowed for more structured societies. I guess from an anthroplogist perspective the views of religon are irrelevant in the rise and fall of societies. Don't get me wrong... this is a thought provoking book. And I feel important in having a basic understanding of why we are what we are. Does it mean everything is completely factually correct? No.... I'd be willing to bet there are some errors (although it is far beyond my ability to point individual flaws). My best guess at an "Error" is his analysis that geography as the main predictor of technological break throughs(as other reviewers have pointed out). However, I think that the Catholic Church proved to be pretty adept at bottling up technology (at least that was the case about 600 years ago!) And yes, it does seem like Mr. Diamond has a bit of an agenda. However, despite what agenda he made of had (what author writes without ANY agenda?) I feel that he tried to be sincere. Through his effort we have a very realistic analysis of how we may have gotten from the Garden of Eden (my words and not his) to New York City.
So there you have it! All tied up into four stars (not 5 because of the occassional dullness factor). Certainly not a read for everyone, but one that history buffs may enjoy!
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