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Summary: Facts to fit conclusions
Review: Such an interesting opening question - "Why do white people have all the cargo?" and such a disappointing result. Diamond says early on that he intends to creat a non-racist explanation for European dominance, constructs a series of variables (see above reviews) required for success, isolates three or four places in the world where these variablies intersect, and then proceeds to find reasons why only the Europeans could have succeeded. My favorite naked cop-out: China could not develop an advance society because its coastline is smooth, see, and so dissenters had no place to hide from a centralized government that suppressed innovation.(Um, why?) Europe's coastline, by contrast, is crinkly. Bettcha didn't know that!
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Summary: Excellent read!
Review: I thought this book was extremely well written. It is interesting and informative at the same time. Esspecially useful are the numerous examples that Diamond uses to back up his sttements. They make it difficult to dispute what he is saying as well as interesting.
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Summary: Smarter
Review: I think that I am a smarter person having read this book.
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Summary: Sorry, Rudyard Kipling
Review: On a recent train trip I picked up this book (which had been recommended by a dear friend) at the station book store and didn't put it down 'til I reached my destination. My wife got hold of it when I returned home and hasn't put it down yet.
The author -- an ornithologist by training -- spent decades in New Guinea in quest of exotic species. While there, he became friendly with the "natives," who refer to the accoutrements of western civilization as "cargo." One of these New Guinea friends asked him, "Why do you white people have so much cargo and we black people have so little?" Diamond took the question seriously. He discards the racist answers we learned in school: that people from cold climates are more hard-working than people from warm climates. Instead, he develops his answer from evidence based on geology, archaeology, zoology and botany.
If you think this sounds boring, think again. Diamond's explanations of why Europeans infected native peoples with diseases but NOT vice versa (in this era of anthrax scares) has put more than Osama bin Laden into perspective for us.
Yes, the book is long; 457 pages, in fact. The point is, it's worth it. Both of us, having read it, want to read it again, to pick up the nuances we missed the first time around.
We not only recommend it, we urge you to read it. This is an important book. It will change every perception you ever had about the spread of "civilization" and the White Man's Burden (sorry, Rudyard Kipling).
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Summary: great read, interesting theory, great history of the world
Review: loved this book, great short history of the world and several civilizations. quick read, didn't want to put it down. gets a little repetitive in the end, when he keeps applying the book's theory to several situations. great introduction to several areas of history, biology, evolution, etc...
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Summary: Anthropology Major
Review: I'm an anthropology major and this book was an amazing summation of everything (and much more) that I have learned about Anthropology and people in all my years at college. I highly recommend it, it will Definately change your outlook on life and people. The book is written for scholars and laymen alike, anyone who has an interest in how humanity became how it is today should take a look at it, and you can all find it at your library as well because it won the Pulitzer Prize! It is the history of the continents, ecological, biological and anthropological. You will learn why the Native Americans didn't conquer Europe, why some people seemed to remain in the "stone age," while others were experiencing the industrial revolution. Why did some people develope a system of writing, why did some stay in groups of 100, instead of cities of thousands? Was a male or a female the first farmer? Did humans wipe out the mega fauna (huge animals like the mammoth and saber tooth tiger) when they colonized America? Did this change thier history? Why would it? Read it, learn, see the world (and it's ethnicities) in a new light.
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Summary: Great pre-text for history
Review: I can't add much here that reviewers before me haven't touched upon. Truely unique interwoven account of history and science. I'm not really a "science guy" but more of a history buff and I found this to be a great pre-text for history. If you like American or European history, this book is a great way to fill in some of the mystery between the start of civilization and the modern establishment of nation states. Some people have found fault with pedantic aspects of the book but I found these easy to brush aside. It drags a bit toward the end but it's a surprisingly quick read.
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Summary: What about ideas?
Review: It seems as though the placement of rocks and trees must have prevented many cultures from having their Leonardo, Smith, de Tocqueville, Jefferson, Michaelangelo, Shakespeare, Aristotle, Madison, Raphael, van Mises, Hayek, Einstein, and van der Rohe. I suppose the civilization-altering ideas of these men are not the products of genius, but, rather, the inevitable product of the earth. As if springing up from a volacano, the ideas that transformed the world (observation and reality over fantasy, capitalism, etc.) and gave some cultures clear and indisputable superiority over other cultures had little to do with the people, but only in their placement on the earth. A neat argument for someone who needs a "white Europeans just got lucky" speech.
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Summary: A new view of where the fertile ground is found...
Review: GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL is a persuasive discourse of competitive plausibility regarding the challenging question why population groups on different continents experienced widely divergent paths of development. Contrary to the voluminous objections cited in the many of the reviews below, Professor Jared Diamond, clearly an enthusiastic proponent of environmental determinism, presents a set of premises consistent with evidence provided from a wide range of disciplines, but he does not attempt to answer the question of genetic diversity, including differentiated intelligence, among racial groups as many reviewers have inferred. If anything, implicitly, the author appears to support promulgations of differentiated intelligences; he sets out to demonstrate intelligence was not the root cause to Eurasian dominance. On at least two occasions Diamond, without equivocation, stated he found on average the New Guinean to be more intelligent than the average European or American. He was prompted to undertake this investigation as a result of a question posed by a New Guinean friend - Why white people developed so much cargo (material goods) and brought it to New Guinea while the indigenous had so little. Diamond summarized his findings as follows: "History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples environments, not because of biological differences among people themselves." Beginning 13,000 years ago, the author illuminated the conditions or circumstances that may have facilitated growth for some groups and inhibited the same for others. Diamond accepts the out of Africa theory for the dispersion of Homosapiens to the other continents (for purposes of his treatise Europe and Asia are indivisible), and like the old axiom of real estate, the importance of location, location, location becomes readily apparent. For Diamond, food production is the ultimate cause of variable rates of development for different peoples. He illustrates how the abundance of wild plants subject to domestication and availability of large mammals served as immediate factors to transition from hunter/gatherer bands and tribes to sedentary agriculturally based chiefdoms and states. Diamond lists what he proposes as proximate causes to European dominance: 1) Germs - based on close proximity to domesticated animals, immunities were developed infectious strains Europeans would carry to other areas, resulting in the decimation of non-immunized populations. In turn, those groups had few autochthonous diseases that would affect the invaders.
2) Invention of writing- relatively sedentary lifestyles facilitated devotion of more time and effort to the creation of methodologies to control and coordinate commerce. These systems eased transfer of information among society members, and had further implications to the establishment of hierarchical political organization.
3) Axial orientation of the different continents - east/ west orientation was conducive to transmigration of people, products, and technologies. Plants best suited to specific climatic conditions were readily transferable; geographic encumbrances were less severe and population isolation was not as significant.
4) Establishment of hierarchical organizations - food production instigated the growth of artisan classes focused on technological improvement, leisure classes devoted to functions unrelated to subsistence, organization of massive armies comprised of professional soldiers, and religion, which allowed individual groupings to live together under codification without killing one another.
5) Continental Isolation - Landmasses that were separated by geographic or ecological boundaries were under less pressure to develop or adopt new ideas, products or technologies from competing civilizations. Some of the author's theories were not defended as successfully as others. His explanation why Sub-Saharan Africans were unable to identify species (the water buffalo and Zebra are two prime examples) that may have been used in farming and commerce seemed rather weak. Capture, taming and subsequent selective breeding for temperament seems as viable here as he indicates was the case on the Eurasian plains for other species. Similarly, he does not offer a convincing argument regarding the American Indian's failure to domesticate the Bison, although the inference seems to be the lack of cultivatible plant life was certainly a factor. Overall, Diamond provides a compelling theory of the differences in development rates among different peoples, linking a wide set of factors that are not generally considered in parallel in the historical record. For anyone with even peripheral interest in the evolution of different societies, this is an enthralling book.
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Summary: Outstanding Study - Thought Provoking
Review: I read this book before taking the History of Western Civilzation, and before taking US History. I have quoted it no less than a dozen times in various papers I have written. And I am certain I will continue to use it as a reference for many years to come. If you're not really interested in History as a discipline, this might be tedious for you. But if you are interested in how we got here, repeating themes throughout the ages, and very plausible explanations and deductions about why the world is the way it is, this study is a great place to start.
There is only one possible assumption made in this book that could eventually prove wrong. Just as every other historian that I know of has claimed, Diamond buys into the population of the Americas by East Asians who crossed Beringia and eventually migrated south. Certainly, this is a plausible assumption. But just as I finished this book, word came out of South America of discoveries at some archeological dig that provided evidence that ancient Amerinds might have a different origin..which is the one assumption I kept questioning as I was reading the book. If this turns into solid proof, it means that humans might have spontaneously evolved in the Americas at about the same time they spontaneously evolved in the Fertile Crescent. It will be interesting to follow these new archealogical clues as we learn of them. But even if this turns out to be true, it won't, in my opinion, have much effect on the major points that Diamond makes in this book. The Europeans still came over with the Guns, Germs, and the Steel -- so much for the mass of Native Americans.
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