Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies | 
 enlarge | Author: Jared M. Diamond
Publisher: Jonathan Cape
Category: Book
List Price: £18.99
Buy Used: £16.00
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Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 328556
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 480
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2
ISBN: 0224038095
EAN: 9780224038096
ASIN: 0224038095
Publication Date: April 3, 1997
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Good condition hardback book with dustjacket. D/J is lightly rubbed round the edges. Ref 1808. Immediate despatch. Ex libary book.
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.co.uk Review
Life isn't fair--here's why: Since 1500, Europeans have, for better and worse, called the tune that the world has danced to. In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond explains the reasons why things worked out that way. It is an elemental question, and Diamond is certainly not the first to ask it. However, he performs a singular service by relying on scientific fact rather than specious theories of European genetic superiority. Diamond, a professor of physiology at UCLA, suggests that the geography of Eurasia was best suited to farming, the domestication of animals and the free flow of information. The more populous cultures that developed as a result had more complex forms of government and communication--and increased resistance to disease. Finally, fragmented Europe harnessed the power of competitive innovation in ways that China did not. (For example, the Europeans used the Chinese invention of gunpowder to create guns and subjugate the New World.) Diamond's book is complex and a bit overwhelming. But the thesis he methodically puts forth--examining the "positive feedback loop" of farming, then domestication, then population density, then innovation, and on and on--makes sense. Written without bias, Guns, Germs, and Steel is good global history.
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| Customer Reviews:
A book for the millenium November 14, 1998
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a book that takes us out of the straight jacket of racialism that has dominated the twentieth century into a new way of understanding how we humans are different. It is a very well written account that covers a vast canvas by a true polymath. (He teaches physiology to Californian medical students) It is full of fascinating detail about historical clashes between ethnic groups, the influences of disease, crop culture, language development, the growth of empires. The author looks at the reasons why some cultures change at a different rate to others. Why some have hierarchies whereas others do not. It is social history on a vast scale. You come away with a clearer picture of how our western world is so cluttered and why our hunter-gatherer bretheren choose to live in less complex and more egalitarian societies and how, sadly, they are fast disappearing. This is one of the most important books of the decade.
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