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: I guess some folks don't have the patience
Review: I think some of the reviewers here didn't read the book closely enough to understand the context of some of Diamond's arguments. He never says that biogeographical effects are the ONLY causes history. His main purpose is the search for the ultimate, extremely general causes for the broadest of trends in human history and prehistory. By the time the Mongols roared across Asia, or the Moguls invaded India, many cultures around the world already changed so much that bioregional factors, though seminal in the creation of these broadest trends, weren't nearly as important as the political, religious and economic ones. He is not ignoring religion and so on but, he states plainly several times that isn't his focus. He is looking for ultimate causes--before humans had extremely advanced mental concepts like religion. He also wanted to point out the devastating influence of disease on history. It was surely the European germs that did most of the conquering of Native Americans. The guns and horses were almost incidental. Later on, once Europeans had established themselves, then we can focus on economic and political systems. But we can't ignore the effects of the diseases unleashed on the Americas. These plagues gave the Europeans a very lucky boost that catapulted them beyond the wealth and power of China, India or the Middle East--long before the Industrial Revolution made this gap obvious. Another thing that some people seem to be having trouble with is his assertions about the native intelligence of tribal peoples around the world. (If you read the book, you notice that he is not just saying this about the New Guineans.) He takes pains to point out what he means by this. He not talking about some mysterious genetic superiority of tribal peoples. It's all straight up culture. Tribal culture forces people to be better generalists than they'd have to be in literate civilizations. They can't rely on embedded support structures like books for memory or experts for obscure fields. They have to be pretty good at a lot things. Otherwise they die. They have to be better at memorizing things because they can't count on computers or books to remember things for them. Living in a dangerous, wild environment makes them cautious and aware of all that is going on around them. That was all he meant. The circumstance of tribal peoples force them, only in very broad ways and only on an individual basis, to be smarter and more curious than civilized people. And in the end it does them no good. Because civilized societies are SMARTER than tribal societies. That is why tribal society has been steadily disappearing over the millenia. They just can't compete. Finally, of course the book is repetitive. In fact he sums up his argument in the preface of the book. You needn't even read the rest if you don't want to. The rest of the book consists of him reiterating his points from different angles to point out the objections he has managed to answer and the many questions that still remain. He is just following scholarly practice and exposition--just to make things clear that he has thought about this. He knows that his theory can't explain everything. In the epilog he points out that China, India and the Middle East are good counter examples to his idea. They each had an expansionist rise to great power--a time when they were unafraid to try new ideas and explore new ways of doing things. If the highly complex forces of economics, politics, religion had arrayed themselves differently. We might all be speaking Arabic now. Or Cantonese. Europe was just lucky to be in the right place at the right time for things to come together as they did.
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: A whole new way of seeing the world
Review: This 400 page summation of 13,000 years of history is hard to put down when it begins and hard to finish when you reach its final quarter. Diamond's friendly style draws the reader in immediately, making the book feel not only lively but vitally important as well. What could be more important or interesting than the reasons why the world has turned out the way that it has? Without a doubt, this is an important book, and not because it won a Pulitzer. Diamond makes a convincing case as he argues against notions that were quite popular when he wrote this at the close of the 90s. He refutes the notions of The Bell Curve, which used pretend science to claim that blacks were destined by genetics to be less intelligent than whites and Asians. Instead, he shows that the reasons why Europeans ended up dominating most of the world instead of Africans or native Australians or Americans are myriad, but boil down to a reasonable set, including: Eurasia's size advantage; the fortunate combination of ancient plants and large animals available for domestication; its east-west axis, making the spread of plant and animal domesticates easier by keeping them in the same climate; and its relatively mild barriers, like the Urals, which posed less a division than rain forests, high mountains, and deserts in the Americas and Africa. The thrilling opening and friendly style are eventually tempered by a repetition of these primary causes; Diamond explores numerous situations around the world, from New Guinea to the New World, and makes essentially the same arguments about each region, adding only nuances for the particulars of each place. It's the beginning of the book that's got the goods-the fourth part, especially, is a litany of details that are less captivating because the reader has learned enough to predict many of them. Still, this is a very useful book for understanding the world, and it will arm you with facts to use against anyone who claims that a person's intellect can be predicted by his or her race. Diamond also shows how present conflicts on the world stage are very similar to ones that have been going on for 40,000 years, casting modernity in the same light as prehistory. And, while the fourth part is slower than the rest, the epilogue explains why Europe leapt ahead of Asia in the last millennium, an explanation that is both fascinating and worth learning from. Why did Europe colonize America and not the other way around? If you'd like to know, read this book. It's weighty stuff, but it will reward you richly.
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.
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