Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

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.

Rating:
Summary: PC propaganda ad nauseum
Review: Had this garbage been written by Jesse Jackson himself, it could not contain more easily disproven racist propaganda. Diamond's primary contention is that white people and western society have gained cultural and social dominance not as a result of any will or abilities of their own, but as a by product of how many domesticable animals and the variety of plant life that make up their environment. While other less fortunate societies didn't have these "luxuries" to take advantage of. Uh, excuse me, it doesn't take a genius to realize the botanical and zoological superiority of Africa for example. Off the top of my head, I can list several potentially demosticle species of large animals in Africa, Asia and Australia. How many can you think of in Europe? The really sad thing is, judging by its popularity and years on the bestseller lists, people are eating this stuff up. This guy obviously hates himself or has spent a little too much time in that New Guinea sun. This type of, I hate to say it, liberal drivel is sickening. There are explanations out there for why western society dominates that actually make sense. Guns, Germs, and Steel isn't one of them.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: Mr. Diamond seems to have written this book as a means of refuting the old theories about non-Europeans being backward, and in a classic case of political correctness, he actually argues that the inhabitants of New Guinea are more intelligent than their European counterparts. (Yes, New Guinea--the same country in which cannibalism is believed to still go on in some areas.) Here's the gist of the author's argument: Europe's dominance of the world was almost solely an accident of geography; Europe had more natural resources (both plant and animal) than any other continent, and even people stupider than New Guineans couldn't have screwed it up.

While there is no doubt that Europe has been blessed with a favorable climate, good soils and plentiful wildlife, the same can be said for many other regions (such as North America, Australia and even West Africa), and Diamond's attempt to explain the difference between them left me unconvinced. Diamond's theory also completely fails to explain the success of Japan--a country that possesses few natural resources. In short, this is a classic case of a guy using selective data to prove a questionable point. Probably not worth your money.

Rating:
Summary: Solid writing, solid logic.
Review: This is a great read, so long as you don't get bored by detail (I don't!). The author is very capable of taking a seemingly boring topic, and creating an entire book around it.
To any person who thinks human variables trump geography and other environmental variables, it important to remember that without the geography to creates the environment that people operate in. I know it sounds stupidly simple, but think about it. One person could not dominate Europe for a great period of time, because of Europe's geography. One person could, however, control all of China, because of China's geography. Thus, without the geography to create the environment, there is no way for any one person to affect the future of the continent.