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

Rating:
Summary: Longwinded and repetitive
Review: The title of the book is pretentious and intriguing, but I found it quite flimsy. The author wants to explain how western civilization could spread so fast, having just come out of the dark medieval times. You would expect a learned book with lots of interesting details, but no. It is a boring and repetitive book without broad arguments. I could not plough through the second half of the book, having read the same type of passages over and over again.

Rating:
Summary: An intelligent, refreshing look
Review: Diamond offers an interesting, somewhat unpopular view of the evolution of human societies. Despite criticisms to the contrary, I find the flow of his discussion to be very well organized. He takes us on a journey through a number of intelligently illustrated variables which, in his view, were key to the disparities among the development of various societies and cultures. However, this work is in no way a complete discussion, as he fails to touch upon the role that organized religions have played in shaping the history of the search for power, wealth and dominance.

Rating:
Summary: Many of the Pieces, Perhaps...But the Whole Puzzle?
Review: Having just finished this book, I have mixed feelings about the conclusions. First, let me make one thing perfectly clear: Reading this book is not a waste of time by any stretch of the imagination, so the one star reviews posted here are simply ridiculous. Having said that, I don't believe for a second that Mr. Diamond can be considered even remotely objective; political correctness and an unfair judgment of Europeans is a large part of this book, which is unfortunate.

The positive aspects of this book are numerous. A carefully organized voyage through human history, describing the origins of farming, animal domestication, population expansion, language and writing development, new technologies, colonization of new continents, and more. All this information, and presented in a nice writing style with a logical progression. You can't help but feel more knowledgeable and informed on many aspects of human civilization after reading this book.

The drawbacks to this book are simple: unfairness. Mr. Diamond rarely discusses European civilization and its benefits, instead describing colonization by Europeans as "catastrophic" under all circumstances. Some of his assertions as to why other peoples/continents lagged behind Europe in advancement and technology are quite reasonable, and probably correct. Others are glossed over quickly in hopes that the reader doesn't start to think about it too much. In regards to all the great geniuses that Europe has produced, he explains that they're "wild cards", and nobody knows how they figure into the grand scheme of human history. His view that New Guineans are smarter than Europeans (and white North Americans) is absolutely ludicrous. His basis for this judgment is that New Guineans are good at remembering jungle paths and plantlife, while white people watch too much TV. What!!? Hmmm...or could it be that if you had arrived at the conclusion that Europeans were smarter this book would never have been published, and you would have been dismissed as a racist! It's interesting to see that people are still against bigotry, unless it's aimed at white people.

Those are some of the thoughts I had while reading "Guns, Germs, and Steel". It is definitely a worthwhile read for someone interested in human history and the dawn of civilization. Just be warned that this book is written from an extremely one-sided viewpoint, with Europeans and people of European descent not getting the credit they deserve.

Rating:
Summary: Intelligent, Though Long, Read
Review: Jared Diamond, the author of Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies in addition to Why Is Sex Fun?: The Evolution of Human Sexuality has sculpted an all encompassing thesis on the evolution of world civilizations. He argues that external influences, rather than human intelligence, shaped the political and social world we see today. For example, Diamond states that the cold weather of Northern Europe required the people of the region to create new technologies (like the chimney) that set them ahead of the people of Africa, who lived in a warm climate and had no need to conserve heat. This, logically, makes sense. Europe and its subsidiary, Modern North America, have dominant power throughout the world to this day.
Some skeptics believe that Diamond found an answer before he found how to prove it. They say that Diamond wrote this book as an excuse to prove white dominance much in the way that Bush's hunt for weapons of mass destruction was a excuse to invade Iraq. This argument is without merit. By reading the entirety of this book, you realize the painstaking efforts of the author to define his argument sensitively, if he did not, Guns, Germs, and Steel would have come across as what the critics define: A racist's manifesto.
As for my opinion, this book is a classic example of how scandal can elevate a author to levels higher that attained naturally. The racists praise Diamond, and the bigots curse him. This allows the general public, which I am a part of, to comfortably learn his words, and how the world came to be.

Rating:
Summary: Lots of info; not sure about the point
Review: There was so much information that I lost the author's point. Granted, this was my first book on the topic. I was very interested in the random facts and I may have to read it again to cement everything together.

Rating:
Summary: Great scope and central thesis, but tries too hard
Review: [Strong 3.5 stars for its scope and development of the central thesis, but loses points for trying too hard to explain away non-European cultural failures.]

The first line of Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize-winning opus is: "This book attempts to provide a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years." His central thesis is that luck of genetic distribution of domesticable plants and animals, particularly cereals and large mammals, gave a tremendous leg up to western Eurasia in the development of civilization. In other words, it wasn't poor choices or innate inferiority that caused most of the world to be dominated by European culture -- just luck.

In a book with greatly wider scope than most nonfiction Pulitzer winners, Diamond pulls together long-term threads of farming, herding, languages, disease, technology, government, and religion. He attempts to explain how trends in all these disparate areas rather inexorably led to the cultural and economic state of the world today. While many of the author's arguments are subject to debate, the writing is lucid; it's easy to see why the Pulitzer committee gave Diamon the prize.

To take to task all the debatable points in "Guns, Germs, and Steel" would be a huge undertaking. I'll try to highlight a few.

Diamond argues that the temperate Mediterranean climate (featuring wet winters and dry summers) of southwest Asia aided greatly in early development, then has to explain why similar climates in California, Chile, and southwest Australia didn't spur development in those places. Human actions (particularly deforestation and overgrazing) have turned what used to be called the "Fertile Crescent" into a wasteland, whereas this didn't happen in the similar southern European area. Thus southwestern Asia possessed the seeds of human development, but the locals squandered their head start. At that point Europe and eastern Asia had an equal chance of pulling ahead, and Diamond proposes that the geographical fragmentation of Europe gave it a competitive advantage over China's cohesiveness. But because he earlier claims that easy movement (for the spread of domesticable species) gave Europe a competitive advantage over America and Africa, this argument is not compelling.

Diamond thinks that the different parts of the world were on a developmental par about 13,000 years ago. At that time there were many more potentially domesticable large mammals in the Americas than there are now. The evidence as to what the human presence at that time is mixed, but Diamond pushes hard to dispute evidence of any prior human occupation. He favors the "Clovis first" theory, which has humans first entering from Siberia across the ice age Bering land bridge not more than 13,000 years ago, carrying stone "Clovis point" weapons. Clovis points have been found in large numbers in mammoth carcasses in North America, and Diamond thinks they were developed in Asia and transported across Beringia. Mammoths are one of the many now-extinct large mammals. From the mammoth kill evidence, Diamond assumes hunting by immigrants from Siberia caused the extinction of not just mammoths but horses, elephants, lions, and all the other megafauna. But there are several problems with this argument. Firstly, there are more recent findings than those Diamond disputes to back up the earlier human occupation theory. Secondly, there are no Clovis points north of British Columbia, which would mean these genocidal immigrants fasted all through Alaska. And thirdly, while there are thousands of Clovis points in mammoth skeletons, to date we've found just ONE clovis point in an American horse carcass, and NONE in elephants, lions, or giraffes -- all at one time widely found in North America.

All of this debate for later occupation of the Americas appears designed to buttress a secondary argument that American development got started too late to catch up with the Eurasians. But ironically, the Pleistocene overkill hypothesis, linked to a single overwhelming swarm of human invaders, argues against Jared Diamond's central thesis. If he's right, it WAS the Native Americans' own fault that they were later overrun by Europeans on horses, becaused they killed and ate all the existing horses on arrival.

Diamond also has to resort to some hand-waving to explain why independent Mesoamerican invention of writing and wheels (used only in toys, rather than tools like wheelbarrows) never went anywhere. Similar weak arguments are used to explain why China went into cultural stagnation centuries ago. Ultimately, the author tries too hard to make all of history fit his model.

In trying to explain why superior technology isn't necessarily accepted, Diamond trots out the old myth about the Dvorak keyboard being superior to the standard QWERTY layout, yet never finding much demand. However, Diamond's book came out in 1997, and the Dvorak myth had been debunked 7 years previously (Journal of Law & Economics vol. XXXIII (April 1990)). Diamond is left with no argument other than cultural superiority to explain why societies that adopt better technology succeed, and he rejects that position a priori.

In his professional career the author has spent much time working in New Guinea. He thinks constant local warfare has made the average surviving New Guinea tribesman superior to the average descendant of European culture, and wants to explain why the people of New Guinea have so little "cargo" (wealth). But Diamond's focus on New Guinea as a model for global development is more elucidating to the author than to his readers.

There are some problems with the book layout itself, including a surprisingly poor index. For instance, trying to look up horse extinctions in the Americas, I found references to horses under "Americas, animal extinctions in" that didn't appear under "horses, in Americas". Also, there are a variety of different maps with different levels of detail to show the migrations of peoples, languages, and domestic species. It's necessary to flip back and forth between the maps to follow the narrative thread.

This is a good book to read, but a skeptical perspective is necessary while doing so.

Rating:
Summary: This book changes everything.
Review: Wow. This book should be required reading for every person of European descent (and everyone else too). Fascinating and gripping. It makes fantastic use of the wealth of data newly available on the origins and prehistory of humans to present a convincing theory of how societies arrived at their current arrangement. Thoughtful and humane but also unflinching in its descriptions of our tribally-based cruelty toward other humans. Really amazing vignettes of scenes from human history, Pizarro's encounter with and destruction of the Incans being a obvious example. A great antidote for racism.

Rating:
Summary: A start to a cohesive view of scientific history
Review: Mr Diamond asks us to follow him along some serious lines of questioning to consider that many fortituous accidents in their ecosystem, not some innate superiorities in their race, gave central and western Europeans advantages that they enjoy / exploit over the rest of the world even today.

This is actually pretty obvious, but no scientist has yet tried to empirically analyze this. For instance, on a very high level, we know that environmental accidents have determined many things in our past: 65 million years ago a 2km-wide object crashed into the Yucatan and caused a world-wide forest fire, mile-high tidal waves and years of darkness, wiping out 70% of life on earth (including the Dinosaurs). Conversely, using the a-bomb on Hiroshima in WWII, (indeed all of WWII, our costliest war to date) while huge in destructive power in human-wrought terms, is trivial to the overall outcome of life on earth in comparison. The former event played a huge role in the development of our species. The latter, while foreboding great cataclysm in store, did not.

A minority of Diamond's critics cite a small number of examples of faulty conclusions he has made in this book that I think he should look into. But many other critics pile a litany of absurd arguments against him that can be summed up as thinly veiled racism. I did, however, get a sense of some of the sweeping conclusions Diamond has made and wondered a bit whether he was going too far, but that does not reduce the value of this book as a compelling cross-examination of the history of the family of humankind.

Those who are attacking Mr. Diamond as being too 'Politically Correct', all I can say is that a cohesive scientific theory is being put together in this book, and those readers are welcome to attack it on its own merits, whereas implying a hidden agenda is simply sneering, mudslinging innuendo: go ahead an prove it if you're so sure.

Rating:
Summary: Not really that great
Review: Despite the fact that Jared Diamond won the Pulitzer Prize for this book, I would beg to differ that this books is all that it is worked up to be. At points, it is down right confusing; at other points, it is so full of elucidation that you tend to get bored.

One thing that irked me about this book, is that in the preface, Diamond refutes the fact that his books is rooted in environmental determinism (the belief that all human actions/history are directly dictated by the physical environment) yet a majority of the book is about how the environment shaped which societies created "Guns, Germs, and Steel." I am not saying that his view is wrong (his ideas about why the Fertile Crescent were nothing short of great) but I am saying that, despite his belief that this books is not, this book is highly influenced by the E.D. beliefs.

I also took note that a few times in the book, Diamond made some conjectures that were totally off base. For example, he brings up the patriotic hymn for America the Beautiful where he paraphrased it by saying "'American the Beautiful' invokes our spacious skies, our amber waves of grain, from sea to shining sea." He uses this shortened version to say that American never had amber waves of grain from sea to shining sea, thus, proving that American grain was founded elsewhere. Not only does the song NOT say that America had grain from the Pacific to the Atlantic, but who would have ever thought such a thing?

I will not deny that this book was extremely well thought through, and that it had some important things to point out when it comes to the history of the world, but to me it was nothing special. It was more advanced than a textbook, and written in a coherent manner for the most part. I enjoyed some parts, but really, it was a struggle to get through.

I give it three stars for 1) pointing out that Zebras are moody and cannot be domesticated, 2) covering 13,000 years in under 500 pages, and 3) for winning the Pulitzer.

Rating:
Summary: A Very Important Biology Book About History
Review: Unlike many, I found Jared Diamond's theory very easy to accept. My thought while reading the book was "It's about time!". While I was somewhat prepared for his assumptions because I had recently read "Ecological Imperialism", about how Europeans exported their diseases and biota along with themselves, to my delight Mr. Diamond managed to take the theory farther. If you have an open mind, you can easily accept how humans developed through history from a biological point of view. Those who are tied to the assumption that racial grouping determined who "won", however, will have the most difficulty with this tome.

What really fascinated me was how we humans came to grow and eat what we do, a question that has always intrigued me. After reading Guns, Germs and Steel, I no longer have to wonder. He also answered the question of wheeled transport (Mexicans had knowledge of the wheel, but not the draft animals to pull a vehicle of any useful size).

I recommend this book highly to anyone who will listen. Yes, Mr. Diamond did take a risk by claiming New Guinea natives are smarter than westerners, and critics have taken him to task for doing so. I wonder though whether they do so because he has touched a nerve. I was happy to see a person of European descent who did not need to prove that Europeans are superior to those from other cultures.

Lastly, I would like to comment Mr. Diamond on his writing style. Obviously, explaining history biologically is a task that could prove confusing to the lay reader. No matter how you feel about his theories, you must admit that the author handled the subject so that the reader can easily understand his points. It ranks, in my eyes, as one of the best written books I have ever read. It won a Pulitzer for a reason!