Customer Reviews

Guns, Germs, and Steel

5 star:		(303)
4 star:		(174)
3 star:		(75)
2 star:		(46)
1 star:		(57)

 

 

This intriguing and expansive book gathers knowledge from a number of fields (archaeology, anthropology, ecology, evolutionary biology, horticulture, and more). Its novelty is not in the details, any of which can be found in other books, but in the synthesis of 13,000 years' worth of human history. Diamond argues that many (but not all) of "the striking differences between the long-term histories of peoples of the different continents have been due not to innate differences in the people themselves but to differences in their environments."

Diamond covers so much material that any attempt at summary would be imprecise. The sections I found most compelling dealt with agriculture and animal husbandry--two topics that would have probably induced sleep if covered by another author. For example, he presents the fascinating background that the dominant five "large" domesticated mammals--sheep, goats, cattle, pigs, and horses--originated in central Eurasia (and that no easily domesticated, large mammals were available, for example, to North Americans or Australians); that these animals include the world's only widespread "beasts of burden," giving their human handlers additional advantages in mobility and farming; and that most of the world's lethal diseases resulted from proximity to the barnyard, gradually providing Eurasians with immunity to illnesses that later wiped out entire societies upon first exposure. The minor mammals (camels, llamas, reindeer) were too limited by geography and climate to affect the course of history outside their confines. As for zebras, bears, giraffes, tigers, hippos--to this day, nobody has been able to domesticate them. While this seems intuitively obvious, no writer has so clearly and irrefutably connected the dots, showing how access to these animals gave early chiefdoms an insurmountable advantage over those human societies without them and allowed them to develop surpluses and commerce that supported the world's most enduring civilizations.

Comments made by the author's critics, while few in number, nearly prevented me from reading this book and need to be addressed so other readers won't be similarly discouraged. A few readers seem offended by Diamond's self-mocking and somewhat tongue-in-cheek assertion (in the Introduction) that the natives of New Guinea have certain advantages that make them arguably more "intelligent." Yet these commentators are willfully ignoring the context: Diamond admits that "New Guineans tend to perform poorly at tasks that Westerners have been trained to perform since childhood," yet he is quite aware of how "stupid I look to New Guineans when I'm with them in the jungle." That is, if one defines "intelligence" not as the knowledge needed to use a computer or write a book review but, rather, as the ability to survive in the wild ("following a jungle trail" or identifying poisonous mushrooms, to cite two of the author's examples), then the New Guineans win hands down. To make a similarly lighthearted argument: when the house of cards we call "civilization" is threatened by the least misfortune (economic recession, power blackout, bad weather, the death of a British princess), a frightening number of otherwise "intelligent" people, instead of relying on their wits and survival skills, rush straight for their therapists.

Likewise, anyone who accuses Diamond of "geographic determinism" cannot have read the epilogue, in which he clearly rejects such an extreme position. He admits that individuals and cultures--and, for that matter, pure chance--can also influence history, but "that some environments provide more starting materials, and more favorable conditions for utilizing inventions, then do other environments." The author's argument is unambiguous: while culture, as well as individual inventors and rulers, certainly influence history on a microcosmic level (during spans of centuries or millennia), there are larger factors, such as geography and ecology, at play when human history is considered as a whole over the last 13,000 years. Diamond is looking at the forest rather than the trees; thus, to fault the author for ignoring such factors as religion and politics is off the mark, since such belief systems didn't exist in anything remotely resembling their present form for most of the period under discussion. Furthermore, to identify human advances in terms of culture still fails to explain how differing cultures arose in the first place.

Finally, and more easily dismissed, are those hecklers who howl "political correctness." Such critics seldom identify flaws in the author's arguments or even tell us what they insinuate by this increasingly meaningless term.

Since the book's span is so sweeping and since many of Diamond's hypotheses are offered tentatively (as suggestions for a new "science" of history), there are bound to be statements or implications that may eventually prove inaccurate or too simplistic. I strongly suspect, however, that his overarching thesis will withstand the test of time; at the very least, "Guns, Germs, and Steel" will inspire open-minded thinkers to consider human history--in its broadest sense--in a whole new light.

Historians generally have an inferiority complex: history is part of the humanities, and for centuries historians have tried to make their subject matter more scientific. This is the first book which actually succeeds. It is not your typical history book as it is based on the sciences of ethnobotany, ethnobiology and genetics. It attempts to address the question of *why* has Euroasian civilization been so successful. The book demolishes all racist arguments, i.e., that European civilization has reached its dominating position as a result of innate abilities of its citizens. Instead, Professor Diamond convincingly argues that it is the prevalence of domesticable plants and animals that are the core factors leading to the development of civilization, and from thence the guns, germs and steel of the title. The only reason I did not give this book five stars is because it bogs down a bit in the later chapters; Diamond tries too hard to support his theses which have already been adequately presented.

compelling (and sometimes dense), an overall well structured argument and a very worthwhile read.

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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.

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.

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.

Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20, but in Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond makes a compelling case for why it was the Europeans who conquered the world and not the Native Americans, Africans or Australians.

Diamond, in attempting to explain this fundamental question gives a broad overview of the history of human civilization, starting from our hunter-gatherer beginnings approximately 40,000 years ago. In this outline, Diamond points out certain natural advantages that Eurasia started out with, which, with the power of compounding statistics, made it a virtual certainty that Eurasians would eventually dominate the globe (baring some outside event like an asteroid collision.)

Some of these are advantages one would not necessarily think of, such as the fact that the Eurasian continent has primarily an east-west axis, while in the Americas and Africa, movement of populations has to go north-south. The east-west axis means that crops domesticated in one area (the fertile crescent or China) can easily be transplanted in other areas since they have similar latitudes and climates. Therefore, food production technology can spread faster. Whereas just going 1,000 miles north or south changes the type of crops that can be domesticated and farmed, thus retarding the spread of food production.

Diamond also points out that another big advantage of the Eurasians was their accidental benefit of having a large number of big mammals survive the late Pleistocene extinctions. This allowed the Eurasians to domesticate a wide range of animals. The Americas were left with one, the llama. Australia, none. Africa still contains large mammals, but all are not easily domesticated. Diamond points out that animal domestication also had an important advantage besides the obvious uses of labor, transport and food. All of our major epidemic diseases come from our domesticated animals. For example, influenza epidemics spread outward from China every year, started by people living in close proximity to pigs. As such, Eurasians developed key immunities from these diseases. But the Native Americans, Australians and Africans had very little experience with these microbes. More important to the conquest of the New World by Eurasians than guns or ships, was the presence of smallpox and other diseases that depopulated up to 90% of North America and Mesoamerica (Somewhat less catastrophically but still potent 30% in South America.)

Diamond deals with very large macro-trends in history. Some people have criticized the book as not being able to explain specific historical elements, but Diamond readily acknowledges this. In Guns, Germs and Steel he is seeking to explain why it was virtually certain Eurasians would displace other peoples and cultures over the long term.

As he notes, this type of macro-history could tell you why Eurasians would populate North America and not vice-versa, but it can't give you insight into why Kennedy won the 1960 Presidential election.

Diamond has been accused of determinism (I am unsure why this is a dirty word.) But Guns, Germs and Steel is an important book because it can, I feel, compellingly demonstrate that history is not random. There are larger trends that lend a certain directionality to history. That directionality may arise from advantages/disadvantages randomly assigned, but once the machinery is in place, the power of probability takes over. In short, it was extremely likely, given the basic factors that Diamond lists, that Eurasians would dominate the rest of the planet. Another outcome, while possible, was extremely unlikely.

Of real interest, and one deserving of book length treatment, is why did the Western Europeans, of the various Eurasian peoples (specifically fertile crescent peoples and the Chinese), come to be the ones who dominated the world? Although only touched on in the epilogue, Diamond posits that the answer for the fertile crescent peoples is obvious, the natural resources of the area were severely strained by the civilizations in the area. The fertile crescent went from being a net food exporter to and importer and populations fell. The question of the Chinese is harder, but Diamond's theory is compelling.

China, even until 500 years ago was by far the technological superior of Western Europe, but their problem is that they were too unified. Essentially, Diamond postulates that China's centralization...cultural and technological progress. A prime example was the Chinese abandonment of oceangoing sailing ships in the 1500's. Although China's seafaring technology was quite advanced, a change in politics in the Chinese court led to a ban on overseas trade. Riding on a multi-masted ship could merit the death sentence by 1525.

This could never have happened in Western Europe where the political culture was highly fragmented. If one nation renounced oceangoing ships, others would continue - and reap the rewards for their initiative, thus putting pressure on the original country to change its policies. When there is fragmentation and competition, selection pressure forces recalcitrant actors to adopt new ways and innovate themselves - or go extinct.

Competition breeds strength.

All in all Guns, Germs and Steel is a compelling work detailing exactly why things have turned out the way they have in terms of global cultures. Even if one is not interested in it for its political aspects, it is a fascinating overview of the last 40,000 of human history and will tell you interesting tidbits like how plants came to be domesticated.

It is easy to understand why this book won a Pulitzer Prize. Jared Diamond is a good storyteller, and in this case the story he is trying to tell is an important one indeed: Why are some nations or regions of the world so rich and others so poor? It isn't, he assures us, because of intelligence, since people in poorer regions are just as intelligent as people in richer regions. Nor is it because of cultural differences, contrary to the thesis of David Landes in The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor. Rather, the key is geography, and Diamond takes us on a fascinating anthropological romp through history to support this thesis.

Harry Potter, step aside - This book is hard to put down. When I finally did put the book down, however, and reflected more on the argument, I was not completely convinced. Surely geography plays a role, but does it play the dominant role in human history? Not likely. In any case, in addition to Landes's book cited above, readers interested in the question of why some nations are so rich and others so poor should also look at the new book by Glenn Firebaugh, The New Geography of Global Income Inequality, for a more balanced perspective on the multiple causes of global income inequality.

While accurate, the theories presented in this book is nothing new. Perhaps the first time published, though.

Nevertheless, it is still factual and a recommended read.

If you want something that will really knock your socks off go online and search for William James Sidis' "The Tribes and States" (unpublished). You'll get a lot of the same as in GG&S, along with political and historical content.

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.