Product Description

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a national bestseller: the global account of the rise of civilization that is also a stunning refutation of ideas of human development based on race.

In this "artful, informative, and delightful" (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. Societies that had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed writing, technology, government, and organized religion—as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war—and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #297 in Books
• Published on: 1999-04-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

From Amazon.com
Explaining what William McNeill called The Rise of the West has become the central problem in the study of global history. In Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond presents the biologist's answer: geography, demography, and ecological happenstance. Diamond evenhandedly reviews human history on every continent since the Ice Age at a rate that emphasizes only the broadest movements of peoples and ideas. Yet his survey is binocular: one eye has the rather distant vision of the evolutionary biologist, while the other eye--and his heart--belongs to the people of New Guinea, where he has done field work for more than 30 years.

From Library Journal
Most of this work deals with non-Europeans, but Diamond's thesis sheds light on why Western civilization became hegemonic: "History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves." Those who domesticated plants and animals early got a head start on developing writing, government, technology, weapons of war, and immunity to deadly germs. (LJ 2/15/97)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From AudioFile
Grover Gardener does as well with scientific material as he does with more traditional literature, giving it spirit and vitality while sounding as interested in the information as readers will be. Although he doesn't pronounce "bonobo" (pigmy chimp) like the keepers in the zoo, nor "Tenochtitlán" like a Mexican, his technical pronunciation is otherwise flawless. The abridgment to one-third of the original does no serious damage, but only deprives readers the privilege of enjoying more of this Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the evolution of civilization. Few writers could ever take so complex a subject and render it as palatable and memorable as Professor Diamond. J.A.H. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Customer Reviews

Wonderful
I found it refreshing to read something which genuinely attempted to grasp the big picture of history. Ably dismissing the conceited and partisan theories of earlier generations (and of most people living today), Diamond proposes sensible scientific alternatives which carry the ring of truth, and apparently so self-evident that it seems amazing no one thought of them before.
He isn't too concerned with the individuals and events which are the backbone of traditional histories. He won't explain why one or other political power in Europe gained the advantage in some situation. These are the fine details of the broader picture - and in a very real sense they don't affect the outcome of history. What Diamond wants to know is, for instance, why a steadfastly stone-age Europe was not colonised by gun-toting Native Americans. His ideas give a kind of tragic certainty to the history that we all know and I suspect that many will try to dismiss them as "cultural determinism", as they have with other authors in this vein.

If I have any criticism at all it is that Diamond rather labours the point, but this is not necessarily a bad thing with new and interesting ideas.

This is an approach to history of which I would like to see a lot more - I could not put this book down. I have read most of the science books shortlisted for the 1998 Rhone-Poulenc prize and am very glad that this one won. Randy One

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A history of humanity's past 13,000 years
-----------------------------------------------------------
How did the West grow rich and conquer the world? It
wasn't racial superiority, as the Victorians thought - indeed, Diamond
gives evidence that the average New Guinean may well be smarter
than the average Westerner. His own one-sentence summary of the
book is: "History followed different courses for different peoples
because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of
biological differences among the peoples themselves"[clunk]. Or, it's the
environment, stupid. Or, the West got lucky.

I'm uncomfortable with history-as-polemics, but Diamond (usually)
keeps his facts and interpretations pretty well separated. And this is a
wonderful one-volume history of the human race. It is unusual, and
refreshing, to read a history written by a distinguished and literate
biological scientist. History isn't generally considered to be science -
"it's just one damn thing after another." But then, you could say the
same for large parts of astronomy, biology & geology.

13,000 years ago, the most recent Ice Age was ending, and people
everywhere still made their living as hunter-gatherers. Diamond starts
his story at the dawn of civilization. By Chapter 3, he's recounting
Pizarro's conquest of the Inca empire in 1532. In an afternoon, 168
Spanish soldiers routed an army of 80,000, killed 7,000, and captured
the Inca emperor. It's not surprising that the Spaniards would feel
superior. But the conquistadores' invisible allies had been at work
since 1492 - smallpox from Spain had killed the previous Inca emperor
and his heir, setting off a war of succession that fatally weakened the
empire. Diseases from Europe would ultimately kill up to 95% of the
native peoples of the Americas, often before they saw their first
European. The old American cultures were doomed from first contact,
even if the Old World visitors had been peaceful explorers and traders.
12,000 years of isolation had left native Americans with no resistance to
the lethal European microbes.

Where did these diseases come from, and why didn't the Indians
return the favor by infecting Eurasia? Many came originally from
domestic animals (for example, measles and smallpox from cattle), and
required large, dense populations to evolve. The Indians had few
domestic animals - one reason why they were poorer than Eurasians,
and those (fortuitously) had no diseases that "made the jump" from
animals to humans - good evidence for Diamond's "history as luck"
hypothesis.

Diamond's history is wonderful, full of new science, strange facts, and
great anecdotes. The polemics get repetitious and a bit defensive at
times, but can be safely skimmed. This would have been a better book
had it been written as straight history, letting the facts speak for
themselves - but it's still well worth reading. Recommended.

Diamond, a professor of physiology at UCLA, is a frequent
contributor to Discover, Natural History, and Geo magazines.

-- Pete Tillman is a consulting geologist based in Arizona.

Good for all types of readers.
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.