politalX Politics Store - Guns, Germs and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years
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List Price: £8.99
Our Price: £6.29
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Manufacturer: Vintage
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
EAN: 9780099302780
ISBN: 0099302780
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Pages: 480
Publication Date: 1998-04-25
Publisher: Vintage
Studio: Vintage
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Editorial Reviews:
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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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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: The World's Most Dangerous Thought Experiment
Comment: (1) Diamond bravely puts his reputation on the block here. He tries to determine just why there has always been those well-known haves and have nots, both across history and still to this day.
(2) Diamond uses many disciplines in his analysis - anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, genetics, biology/microbiology, history, epidemiology, migrational studies, immunology, history of medicine, the history of technology etc.
(3) He argues that the scientific, technological, engineering, medical, architectural, mathematical and other such achievements and innovations of certain races of humankind (white skinned and brown skinned) are no more than a matter of geographical luck and being in the right place at the right time.
(4) There is no more to it than that. It's not a matter of sheer mental talents, astonishing scientific and mathematical creative gifts, amazing minds, boundless brilliance, a lack of indolence. It's certainly not due to a congenitally superior intellect. It's nothing to do with the ability to think deeply, with sheer power, intricacy, subtlety and finesse and the drive to work and think hard.
(5) What this often unintentionally funny book basically suggests to me is that its readers run a very dangerous thought experiment. Would you like to try my thought experiment here and now? Let's go.
(6) First, run back the clock of time. Run it back to the dawn of homo sapiens sapiens. Now take the 4 major racial types: Australoids, Caucasoids, Mongoloids, and Negroids. Remove the second group from the face of the Earth, forever.
(7) Now run history forward with what you've got. Do we have 2 space probes that have left the solar system? Cell phones? FED or SED Television? Computers? Software? The Internet? Bose-Einstein condensates? Broadcasting? Immensely complex broadcast equipment and receivers? DAB radio? Newspapers? The microchip? Recording and mixing desks? Blu-ray DVD players? Inoculations? The Airbus A380? The Large Hadron Collider? Gravitational wave experiments? Robots on Mars and a probe on a moon of Saturn? Do we have GPS satellites that take the Theory of Relativity into account? Cities? Sanitation? Highways? Bridges? Schools? The combustion engine? Machinery? Space probes that take gravitational sling-shots from planets? Ground and space telescopes? Manufacturing? Electricity? Nuclear energy? The modern battery? Trains and railways? Nanotechnology? Atomic clocks? Add to the list yourself - because there's a lot. Isn't there?
(8) Do we have the astonishing, colossal and stupendous scientific, engineering, mathematical, architectural, medical, surgical, medical scientific and technological achievements made upon the Earth to date?
(9) Would we even end up with the book or the wheel by 2010?
(10) Do we have a rich history, with a Euler, an Einstein, an Ed Witten, a Carl Friedrich Gauss, a Marie Curie, Bohr, Born, James Clerk-Maxwell, Watson & Crick & Wilkins & Rosalind Franklin, Darwin, Davy, Lise Meitner, Euclid, Archimedes, Faraday, Kepler, Newton, Robert Boyle? Poincare, Charles Lyell, Mendel, Oppenheimer, Planck, Boltzmann, Pauli, Heisenberg, Shrodinger, Rutherford, Dirac, Feynman, Hawking, Pauling, Lavosier, Mendeleev, Dalton, David Hilbert, Galois, Riemann, Ramanujan, Wheeler, Galileo Galilei, da Vinci, Helmholtz, William Thomson, Clausius, Willard Gibbs, Walther Nernst, Turing, Godel, Wittgenstein, Berners-Lee, Hubble, Kaluza-Klein, Pasteur, Gell-Mann, Veneziano, Michio Kaku, Sadi Carnot, Robert Mayer, Eddington, Fermi, Chandrasekhar, Lisa Randall? Google great architects, engineers, famous geologists, pioneering surgeons and other such people too ... add to the list.
(11) Would we really have all this astonishing mental achievement and all these great outcomes? To me the answer is clearly NO. We would not be even close.
(12) Jared Diamond argues differently. Read his book. Then sit down and run, in your own head, the world's most dangerous thought experiment ...
Customer Rating:
Summary: Interesting read
Comment: This book seemed to be on dsplay in bookshops at around the same time as "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations" by David Landes. Whereas David Landes is an economic historian, Jared Diamond is an anthropologist and geographer.
Having read both books, it struck me that there were often two competing explanations for the same phenemona. I think each author should moderate the others views. I think that both authors have a tendency to push their own pet theories a little further than they really ought to go and perhaps it would be better to take the best insights from both approaches and combine them into a bigger explanation than arguing about 'what came first - the chicken or the egg?'.
Diamond combines grand overarching theories with detailed discussions of such topics as the way in which various plants and animals were first domesticated.
Altogether a compelling read but one has to take it with a pinch of salt.
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Summary: Good history, but not the complete story?
Comment: At the simple level, this book is a tour de force of the history and geography of mankind, and of how the latter has helped to shape the former. It is a book that everybody should read, if only to counterbalance the eurocentric versions of world history that dominate the bookshelves. Diamond explains how accidents of plant and animal distribution gave some peoples the advantages in agriculture and hence population density that they needed to conquer others, and most interestingly, led them to develop world-conquering diseases.
However, I was a little wary when the author of a science book sets out with a political aim, namely to prove that the present observed inequalities in wealth, goods and technology between peoples of the world are entirely explained by the environment. Put simply, Diamond tries to settle the 'nature-nurture' debate once and for all in the favour of nurture. While I think he makes a compelling case why Australasia never developed agriculture and the technologies that spring from it, the argument is much thinner in the case of Africa and the Americas. Why, for example, in continents that lacked suitable horses or oxen to provide mechanical power were there no attempts to develop water-wheels or windmills?
While many of Diamond's observations about the three major land-masses on Earth are undoubtedly correct, there is no reason why these could not coexist with other explanations, such as genetic differences between the capabilities and behavioural preferences of different peoples. And if they were to coexist, there is a likelihood that natural advantages would reinforce the rate at which genetic differences developed and diverged. In order to prove that the wealth differences are entirely the result of the environment, Diamond would also need to disprove that there are any genetic differences, something that he fails to do. I'm afraid that the only argument he proposes against genetic contributors, namely "because they are supported by racists", while it may be true, doesn't cut the mustard intellectually. No, he needs to demolish the genetic argument systematically, citing references from equally reputable peer-reviewed journals.
Sometimes the holes in his argument are in what is omitted, rather than in factual content (which is, by and large, impeccable). For example, he stated that the native people of New Guinea were likely more intelligent on average than native Europeans, because the former have much greater natural selection pressures placed upon them, both from the environment, and from the much higher murder rate. In doing so, of course, he avoids the possible effects of sexual selection for intelligence over the last 10000 years: in the West, the preference of women for wealthy men, who have the resources to support more children, must surely have influenced the population's genetic profile. Likewise, the harsh winters in Eurasia seem to have led to resource-storing behaviours in the North, and this ability to defer gratification, which has at least in part a genetic root, has contributed to Eurasian numeracy, inventiveness, capitalisation, finance, trade, and other behaviours that have led to us having all the 'cargo'.
In summary, this book is a notable achievement, and a very worthwhile read. However, while it contributes much to the debate on the varying fortunes of the peoples on different continents, it fails in its political aim, that of proving that genetic differences have played no part in the matter.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Plants, animals and farming
Comment: Have you ever wondered why the world has developed the way that it has? Why some cultures and peoples seem to have prospered better than, or even at the expense of, others? If so, Guns, Germs and Steel, by Jared Diamond is a book I would recommend to you. It is deeply thought provoking and well written, squeezing a history of humankind's development over the past 13,000 years into around 400 pages, which, as Diamond points out, is about 150 years per page, so not a small feat.
The basic premise of the book is that all of the worlds more advanced societies, including both those still present today and those that have disappeared into history, needed a set of complementary enablers (Ultimate Factors) to be present to allow them to develop from the original state of hunter-gatherers, from which base all people originally started. The thing that surprised me about this was just how short this list of required enablers is and as a result just how unlikely/fortunate it was that many different and varied societies did develop at all.
From the Ultimate factors, Diamond draws out a series of sequential proximate factors that lead to such historical events as European settlers not managing to settle the vast majority of the African continent or New Guinea, the decimation of the original inhabitants of North America - mostly through diseases introduced from the Old World. And, many more.
In brief, a selection of these factors include:
*The geography of any given area and the plant and animal species supported; how many of the originally wild animal species would prove suitable for domestication; How many wild plants would be worth planting - rather than say, going hunting?
*If you had enough plants and animals to domesticate, would you give up being a hunter gatherer?
*If you became a farming society would you produce enough spare food to support none-food producing crafts; politicians and artisans?
*If you did support none-food producing peoples would this eventually lead to a large dense and sedentary society etc etc
One of the many things that I really liked about this book was that it is not written from an Anglo-Saxon perspective, which is very refreshing. Further, although the book isn't, I believe, intended to be a scientific text on the matter, Diamond does provide extensive references for further reading should anyone wish to do so.
I read this book having (relatively) recently finished reading Pathfinders by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto and found the two books to be very complementary. I would recommend this book and Pathfinders to anyone with an interest in history, politics or humanity in general.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Enlightening
Comment: Wow. Well I have always wondered in the back of my mind why the continents have spanned out as they have, and as only great scientists can Mr Diamond has got round to answering in a hugely ambitious and incredibly fact-filled fascinating book.
I can't really say anything that hasn't been said here already but most importantly for me this book has reignited a passion for human history in me and that is achievement enough.
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