Do NOT get the Kindle version of this book. Get the "dead tree" version. There are numerous illustrations that do not come through properly on the ebook. Some of the tables that do come through are almost unreadable. I was shocked when I saw a paper version after reading the ebook. I really missed out.

This book was recommended by a friend who taught Honors history at the high-school level. I have been enjoying it enormously - it has helped me to put into perspective how human cultures arose and intertwined, affected by geography, climate and other factors. A challenging but comprehensible read.

I read the book in a Chinese translation a long time ago. As all the footnotes and bibliography were not included in the Chinese edition, I ordered a hardcover of the original book and found there is a new chapter on Japan added at the end. It is a very inspiring book to anyone who is concerned with the fate of mankind. Readers interested in the author's view should also read his other books, namely "Third Chimpanzee", "Why is sex fun?" and "Collapse".

No book or school in this field will convey the ultimate truth and understanding why some societies develop faster and different than others. Keeping this in mind, this book contains a lot of dimensions to think about, while it tries to cut down to the main drivers of development at the same time: guns, germs and steel. Actually, a lot more is discussed than just that. Sometimes it runs in loops, but still these discussions in circles make sense revisiting earlier conclusions from a different angle. After I started reading, I did not close the book until it was finished, revisiting many times my studies in Geography at Cologne University (more than 20 years ago) and the discussions of a deterministic approach for development. Enjoyed this book.

Totally regret this purchase. Two chapters in i quit. This guy is so self ceter and full of....? bull.

Diamond looks at the development of humanity throughout history in a new way. His analysis of how mankind changed through technology and how certain countries easily conquered much larger ones is explained with several examples via a historical analysis. His look at farming and farm animal diseases and how these influenced human immunity explains the advantages certain conquerors had over others. Though much is theory, the ideas it promotes are very convincing.

I was searching for a world history book that would condense the most significant events into one volume. A friend happened to recommend this book so I bought it. Although I've only read one third of the book, it seems to me a little dense and scientific. It does not read as a novel but rather as a scientific approach towards civilization. For an avid history major this may seem like the right book; however, for someone looking for a brush up on world history from a broad perspective, this book would seem technical and even boring at some points. There's also the constant referral to New Guinea in almost every significant aspect of the book; no doubt attributable to the field work performed by Diamond on this particular place. It seems however that it obscures the objectivity of world history by his specific findings and subjective conclusions. However being only a beginner in terms of world history knowledge, I would leave it up to historians to debate this last point. Loaded with data and scientific conclusions on very specific areas; low on generalized high view cornerstones of history...

After reading this book, I've gifted it to several friends. I further encouraged each of them to pass it on when they finished with it. It is an easily read but powerful look at our World as we know it and as good an implied condemnation of racism as any I've ever seen. While this sounds very serious, the book is actually wonderfully fun and entertaining!

I envy Jared Diamond. His two books "Guns,Germs and Steel" and "Collapse" are products of a life well lived. He has combined his life experiences, education and his own reason to create works that move our society's intellectual wealth a giant leap forward.

Detractors may claim that his version of history dehumanizes events. Rather, this work emphasizes that there are undeniable physical constraints and advantages each culture encounters. It is these factors which provide the framework for individual choices and development.

I read this book some years ago, and provided many "aha" moments. Diamond's explanations are extremely compelling, even to someone with more than a passing education in history, geography and historiography. Of course, they are all a "just so" story, rather than an accurate representation of how things turned out. Geography *of course* is important in the historical development of different nations and civilizations. Is geography (along with associated factors of agricultural technology, domesticated animals and his pained explanation about why Europeans were better with guns than the Chinese who invented them) the only factor in why Western Civilization grew to dominate others? Of course it isn't. Europe had no unique access to these things: Asian civilizations had arguably superior such advantages. Victor Davis Hanson makes a similar "one factor" argument in his book "Carnage and Culture." Hanson's argument is that Westerners are simply better at war than other civilizations, because most Westerners were influenced by the Ancient Greeks, who developed a superior method of combat and of developing innovations than other nations did. Is Hanson's theory 100% the One True Answer? No, the rise of Japan and the invincibility of Mongol raiders rather puts his theory to fault, but it's at least as important as geography. There are all kinds of "one factor" arguments possible, all of which could make for as convincing a book as this one. Victorian historians thought it was the vigor of "nordic" civilizations which made Western world domination inevitable: also convincing if that was the only book you had read on that particular day, and also ultimately deeply silly (basically, this means the West dominates because it is dominant). Other Victorian historians made out human history to be the product of great battles, all of which had a huge element of random chance. Spengler also famously thought of civilizations as "cultural organisms" which eventually get old, become frail and die, just like any other organism whose telemeres have gotten shorter. I would imagine, like in, say, finance, the actual explanation for history is kind of complicated. I bet the Greek way of war has something to do with it, along with geography, culture, the Catholic Church, language and a whole lot of random chance. It's nice to think we know exactly why something happened, but a lot of what happens in the world, especially the world of human beings, is just plain random noise. Putting one factor explanations on history as Diamond does is not particularly helpful.

There is also the matter of historical perspective. Diamond writes as if everything leading up to the present time of European world cultural domination were some kind of historical inevitability, and that *of course* -thus it will always be. This is the sheerest nonsense. At various times in human history, "Western Civilization" consisted of illiterate barbarians living in mud huts. In very recent times in human history (like, say, the 1930s), it kind of looked like that's where the West was heading again. Other civilizations culturally and physically eclipsed or dominated the West through history: the Japanese, the Chinese, the Islamic civilizations, Egyptian, Assyrian, Mongolian, Persian or Russian (if you count them as different, which I do) civilizations made Western civilization irrelevant through vast swathes of human history. Such civilizations may again eclipse Western civilization. Just to take one example, the Zoroastrian Persian civilization lasted longer than Rome, covered more territory and was in many ways more advanced: they even generally beat the Romans in warfare in the middle east. Why should I privilege the Romans over the Persians, just because some nations who were rather vaguely influenced by Rome now dominate the nations who were influenced by the Persians? I privilege them because they are my cultural ancestors, though in 1000 years, the poetry of Rumi may be more important than that of Martial.

Finally, there are the matters of Diamond's historical veracity and bigotry. To address the second thing first, he seems to take a sort of perverse glee in making racial pronouncements to the detriment of "Western" people. According to Diamond, Western people are dirty, and have developed special immune systems; something I find hard to believe, and doubt is backed up by anything resembling statistical fact. Why wouldn't east Asians have developed superior immune systems? They lived in cities longer than the ancestors of most Westerners. Also, according to Diamond, he can tell that the average New Guinean is "on the average more intelligent, more alert, more expressive and more interested in things and people than the average European or American. (page 20, along with a tortured explanation of why Diamond's vacation perceptions are supposed to be superior to a century of psychometric research)" This is the sort of casual bigotry that used to inform Nordicist history about the dominance of the West, except somehow it becomes politically correct when pointed at Western people in modern times. Personally, I figure this just makes Diamond a garden variety modern bigot: a late 20th century version of a pith helmeted Kipling type who yammers on about "lesser breeds without the law." To make matters worse, he's also empirically wrong: New Guineans have an average IQ of around 85, wheras Europeans and Americans are closer to 95 or 100, depending where you look (source; wakipedia). His historical veracity leaves rather a lot to be desired as well. I don't think he actually *knows* any history, other than the type of silliness you pick up in High School history classes. Diamond is a professional zoologist by trade, and it shows. For example, his ideas about China would be laughable to a Chinese person conversant with their history. He also got some of the dates and a lot of facts wrong about the conquest of South America. Sure, lots of Aztecs and Incas died of disease: most of them *after* they were conquered by the Spaniards. In fact, the few Spaniards there were were far more afflicted by tropical diseases than were the Aztecs: this is recorded historical fact. Yet, it doesn't fit Diamond's "Westerner as plague rat" theory, so he doesn't think to bring it up. Either he learned his history of the conquest of South America in a comic book, or he's deliberately misleading the reader. This is a complete travesty, and rather indicates you shouldn't trust anything else he's stated either.
When people find out I write about history, the often bring this book up. I tend to politely change the subject. Everyone who reads this book thinks they're uniquely enlightened for having read it. In reality, they've been duped by a half baked popular writer who knows very little about history, and has some very ugly views about humanity.

What is really amazing in this book is how the author managed to present his ideas in only 500 pages. Usually 500 pages are a lot, especially if the book is bad. However, this book is about the evolution of different societies in different places on the earth. The book attempts (and succeeds) to explain why some people moved forward while others stayed stuck in their places. Such a feat requires much more than 500 pages, but Jared Diamond pulled it off without sacrificing the readability or the scientific rigor of his book. This is without a doubt one of the most important books that I have read. The author deals a huge blow to racist interpretations of human evolution and progression. Even though some people would think any kind of determinism is degrading to humanity, one can hardly argue that our environment (be it culture, land, language, beliefs...etc) plays a huge role in shaping our future. This is not the first time that someone has used environmental determinism as an argument to human behavior, but the data and quality of the arguments used in this book are definitely the best used so far. Yet the book is still readable by all. Kudos to the author.

Guns Germs and Steel deserves a place of honor in any History wonks bookshelf next to the "Discoverers." Diamonds arguments on why the west rose to power in the 1500s through 2000 meshes almost perfectly with William McNeil's Pursuit of Power.

This book was recommended by a friend when I recommended Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. I can see why he suggested this book- it was very interesting and did present a historical, sociological and economic perspective to emergence. Meg Wheatley would be proud. Diamond does a great job of walking through the complex set of variables- including guns, germs, and steel- that led to larger masses of people to emerge and proposes a number of possible reasons why the Native Americans and other civilizations ended up in tiny reservations, rather than the Eurasians. The book covers a fascinating topic and provides a great review of history and asks some great questions. I think Diamond does a great job of making the connections between the elements presented in the book and making it real and relevant for his audience- and it does it in an engaging way. I recommend this book to anyone interested in anthropology, sociology, history, economics, or emergence/chaos theory.

I was just about to attempt to write something that hadn't been written, but I see that is out of the question. The author, Diamond, is obviously very knowledgeable in his field of study, but it seems that he has attempted to simply write something that hasn't quite been said before. The result is the opposite of what so many have said regarding European supremacy throughout history, mostly recent history.

Without going any further, I will just allude to Mr. Christopher A. Smith's review. I don't think it could be said any better. I am a white American, and I'm not sure I would be able to critique the work as effectively as Mr. Smith, since he notes his race and the fact that he still has a problem with Diamond's approach. Mr. Diamond's approach is indeed biased. I'm not faulting the author; I'm sure it would be next to impossible to tackle this subject matter without leaning one way or the other. At any rate, well said, Mr. Smith.

All the hype led me to believe that this would be an insightful and intelligent analysis of world history. It was interesting, but it so very barely skimmed the surface of the topic that it easily could have been condensed into a ten page essay. The ideas are obvious, the treatment of the subject is shallow, and his writing is addressed to a second-grade level of world understanding. You can get everything you need from the book by reading the description and looking up some of the referenced material. Jared Diamond should not be respected as a scholar.

while i think this book is an interesting one, in that it explores questions of human history that few have been able or willing to take on, i found it excruciatingly long. the q&a style of the writing also got a bit old for me. so, to me, great information that i'd have been happier to receive in 1/2 the number of pages.

About the most anti-scientific and anti-historic thing you can do when writing a book is to make up theories and philosophies that you think would be nice and then "fill in the blanks" by using selective evidence and interpreting it in your own way to suit your assumptions. Selecting the arguments to fit the theory. Unfortunately, this is what it seems Jared Diamond is doing the whole way through this book.

The entire book is for me a dramatic crusade by Jared Diamond to prove that he's not prejudiced against non-white people and trying to show how genes didn't play an influence AT ALL on civilisation and farming. He says that people from New Guinea are much smarter than europeans and he even goes so far as to put pictures of his friends from New Guinea in the book and dedicating the book to them (he does have pictures of people from other races as well). Many pages in this book could just as well be huge print of: "Look at me! I'm not a racist. I'm saying the non-whites are there by environment alone."

But his propensity for arguing like this reveals a more insidious presumption on his part. He presumes that people who would choose to be hunter-gatherers simply because they wanted to, would be inferior. He is blatantly heavily prejudiced against the hunter-gatherer way of life, and for the farming way of life. Even more so is he against people who are less intelligent than others by continually talking about the "ingenuity" of farming and continually implying that to paraphrase: "farming the land shows superiority if it were the same environment, but the environment is very different throughout the world".

So unfortunately at every opportunity, Diamond lets his emotions get in the way of real science and critical thinking. His arguments are pretty pathetic in my view. There could be any number of reasons why farming took off in, as he continually calls it "eurasia", and a lot less in other places. Who really cares why it took off there? Nobody is going around saying "civilisation started in eurasia first therefore we're more intelligent and somehow deserve more".

I picked up this book hoping it would do as the cover stated, give me "a short history of everybody for the past 13,000 years". I didn't realise it was simply a crusade using (in my view) highly spurious and unfalsifiable arguments with one single goal in mind: to convince readers that genes don't make any difference at all.

This is what a typical argument in the book goes like: "such and such people near eurasia discovered the Superior farming method of living 6,000 years ago, while these other people near them only developed it 2,500 years ago. The lands appear similar, everything appears similar, so what happened?" Here nearly any prudent person would shrug and simply say "I don't know, it could be for any reason", but not Diamond. He then adds something like: "The answer lies not in that they're not as ingenius a race at all, it's because locusts would eat all their crops". Sometimes he even adds: "I know this sounds surprising/bizarre".

I simply cannot put any confidence in a man who for instance claims that the reason for the QWERTY take-over was to try to slow down typists. It's a well-known fact that it was to prevent jamming of the keys, that's why keys that were often used weren't placed close together. Jared Diamond also claims this to be "funny", but I found nothing funny about his made-up reasoning. He also said that a new keyboard layout has been developed that allows typists to type TWICE AS FAST as with 95% less effort!!! Imagine that, at least 120 words per minute with 95% less effort. How can anyone take a man who makes these sort of incredulous and arbitrary and just plain wrong claims on such simple things that we're all familiar with seriously on anything?! There are a number of examples throughout the book where I happened to have extra knowledge on the subject and was startled at some of his assertions. I cannot put any credibility in such a man.

So for conclusions such as that hunter-gatherer tribes are exceptionally egalatarian, and that the more densely populated a region is the less egalatarian it is: I simply can not afford a bone in my body to trusting this man's conclusion on anything, especially something political like that, given the rest of the book. Perhaps they aren't egalatarian at all (chimpanzees aren't), but Diamond just didn't see the rankings and relations within the tribes properly or didn't want to see them. There is nothing good or bad about rankings/egalatarianism, they both have a purpose. If Diamond wasn't so set on demonizing and politicising things I might have a reasonable amount of faith in his conclusion.

I did learn a few things from it and I like reading real history about this type of stuff, that's why I give it a 2 rather than a 1. But leave the pseudorational arguments out of it.

I'll leave you with this example quotation: "In short, Europe's colonization of Africa had nothing to do with differences between European and African peoples themselves, as white racists assume." Charming!

Guns, Germs, and Steel consistently suffers from poor or inconsistent argumentation. In the prologue he states that he has the "impression that New Guineans are smarter than Westerners" (p. 20) because, "modern European and American children spend so much of their time being passively entertained by television, radio and movies" (p. 21). Yet he consistently repeats that at least 13,000 years of history is needed to assess peoples and cultures; to do otherwise is racist. How can he then make inference about a people's intelligence based on 100 years of history? In Chapter 15, he recounts how two British men died on an expedition from North to South Australia, unable to cope with the hot Australian climate and difficult terrain: "Robert Burke and William Wills were smart enough to write, but not smart enough to survive in Australian desert regions" (p. 321). He makes a similar case about him and his wife's difficult trek in Australia. But, repeatedly he states that one of the conditions of long-term success for any people is population size. No doubt, a large population facilitates specialization and adaptation. So how can he draw race-based inferences about intelligence based on a sample size of four? In other arguments, he begs the question. For example, he points to today's undomesticated animals and uses that assessment as evidence that they were not domesticable 13,000 years ago (and are not domesticated today) (p. 162-175).

On other occasions he invokes various political philosophies - and does a disservice to them. Diamond provides an incorrect summation of the ideas of Aristotle and Rousseau in order to compare their ideas about the foundations of societies with his own. Aristotle does not argue that "states [are] the natural condition of human society" (p. 282). Rather, Aristotle is not even interested to discuss communities other than the city-state (polis) because he wants to discuss a partnership of free and inter-relating human beings. Moreover he considers man a political animal because he is driven to live in a community - whether it is a state, chiefdom, tribe or band is irrelevant. Only in a human society can man fulfill his true nature - this is Aristotle's line of reasoning. Rousseau did not "speculate that states are formed by a social contract, a rational decision reached when people calculated their self-interest" (p. 283). Instead, Rousseau argued that society should be organized as a contract between free individuals. A social contract is not a description of how society is or has been, but how it should be. Equality is the natural human state; while society had been used to impose artificial restraints. Rousseau's social contract is prescriptive, not descriptive. He also offers a superficial Marxist interpretation of the role of religion. It is meant to placate the masses in accordance with the wishes of the ruling class (pp. 277-278). I don't know why Diamond does not consider the multitude of other anthropological explanations for the development of religion: it offers consolation; it provides meaning and makes sense of man's role in the universe; it gives conceptual coherence to many disparate and confusing phenomena, etc. Wouldn't an anthropological approach be more commensurate with his methodology?

I don't deny Diamond's thesis that geography has played and continues to play a vital role in the development of mankind; indeed, I strongly agree with it. It is a perspective that historians and philosophers have long considered. At least as far back as the 17th century, Montesquieu argued, in The Spirit of the Laws, that climate and geography shape the character of peoples.

Ultimately this book is a hodge-podge of unconvincing arguments, inappropriate summaries, and recent anthropological scholarship. It is the last feature which is the book's one strength: it provides a consolidation of various interesting research on agriculture, language, and tools.

The author mainly argues that societies developed differently on different continents because of advantages in geography, not advantages in human biology. In the book, we can conclude that there are four reasons to account for all historical development. Firstly, it is the number of the crops and animals to be domesticated. The second reason is the speed of agriculture development in the continents. The next reason is the knowledge communication between different continents. The forth reason is the size of population. Diamond argues that all of four factors have convincing evidences. And Diamond was able to explain geographical factors integrating knowledge from a wide range of subjects, including molecular biology, epidemiology, human genetics, linguistics, and archaeology. The book demonstrates the depth of the author's technical, linguistic, political, historical research. To the author's credit, when reading this book, I find myself accepting the term `geographical determinism' almost unconsciously. The theory Diamond sets forth is convincing enough, but the reality is more complex than simple geographical determinism--there are other factors at work, like culture and human decision, especially after the Neolithic Revolution.

This is an impressive book. On the one hand, Diamond answers the complex question, "why did Eurasians conquer, displace or decimate Native Americans, Australians, and Africans, instead of the reverse?" using only three tiny objects: guns, germs and steel. Guns influence the course of political development. Germs are an additional thread of this transfer of power. Steel gives us a clue into technical advancement. The author does not get lost in complicated and trivial factors; on the contrary, he dismantles racially-based theory through analyzing environmental factors in the human history. On the other hand, Diamond brings to the book a great breadth of knowledge. When he began quoting writers from the Zhou Dynasty (first millennium BC), describing history many Chinese aren't even aware of, I was convinced of his credibility. As a scientist, I was able to appreciate Diamond's ability to express intricate and often inaccessible microbiological concepts in a clear way, to convey the magic of the microbial world to readers with a more general background. Take, for example, his description of the microbe's side of the spread of disease:

"Many of our `symptoms' of disease actually represent ways in which some damned clever microbe modifies our bodies or our behavior such that we become enlisted to spread microbes... the strategy practiced by the influenza, common cold, and pertussis (whooping cough) microbes, which induce the victim to cough or sneeze, thereby launching a cloud of microbes toward prospective new hosts."

As well-researched and thorough as it was, when you leave the book, you will have a suspicion that the author intentionally ignored the adverse evidences to support his opinions. In James Blaut's article, "Environmentalism and Eurocentrism", "he pointed out examples of North-South diffusion of crops, notably the cultivation of maize in both Peru and North America (1999)". But the book did not mention that several important crops that grow outside the temperate parts of Europe. And as a Chinese reader, I cannot eliminate a feeling that the writer always is looking for the evidence to support genetic racial equality while perhaps ignoring evidence that might suggest otherwise.

In the book, Wealth and Poverty of Nations, author David Landes said "China's conscious decision in the 1400's to isolate itself from other nations was the key event that caused it to lose its technological advantage and fall behind Europe". Diamond also addresses this point from a geographical view. His argument: China was able to become a monolithic, autocratic country because of geographical factors, most importantly, its geographic connectedness. However, I think it is too simple to explain why China fell behind Europe. More explanation can be drawn from a cultural basis, such as political freedom, capitalism and open debate. The thoughts of Confucius were embedded deeply into the people of China for almost 5,000 years, and Chinese people innately believed agriculture was more important than commerce and industry. Although the commerce made a progress to some extent, they did not pay enough attention to it thus advanced industry could not be developed quickly. Also, the prevailing notion that people should stay loyal to the emperor and never resist, allowed the Chinese people to blindly accept they were the so-called super-country the emperor claimed. Actually they had ability to explore new lands, but their culture told them they were strongest and they did not need to do so.

According to the statistics outlined in Andre Frank's, Reorient: Global Economy in the Asian Age, during the Ming Dynasty, China had a much stronger economy than Europe. Thus the Chinese found no need to conquer other countries for economic gain, instead focusing on the inner economical. The book did not address this point.

Cultural elements do work in the human history development. But there is a question why different countries have different cultural thoughts. Now that genetic biology is not the reason, geographical environment shaped the basic ring of human history. But Diamond could not clearly answer why Confucius thoughts emerged in China, not other places, so did Socrates in Europe. The complexity of the issue may, in itself, explain why this was not addressed in this book.

In summary, this book exhibits us a new picture of human history from a specific view of selecting three representative objects. In the book, you can view the fate of human societies from new vantage points. But you should have a bit of skepticism, because while Diamond convincingly argues that geographical elements play a vital role in the human history, culture and human decisions are also important.

The author is on firm ground when he develops his case for the ultimate reasons of the differences in technological and structured societies in pre-history. But as he approaches modern times, he walks on thin ice. He argues that a given society's receptivity and drive for innovation is dependent on so many diverse factors that we should consider it a random variable. That's disappointing. His work tries to build an explanation for the difference to counter the thesis of white people's genetic superiority. But he is ready to admit, with very weak arguments, that hunters-gatherers possibly have superior intelligence to whites. So, after all, a few thousand years may be enough for natural selection to improve the intelligence in human beings! If that were true, the opposite could also be true. I think that hard to believe, but I have no scientific evidence to discard it.
I fear that Diammond dares to propose the superior intelligence of hunter-gatherers because it is safe to do so in our politically correct times.

I bought the book to use as a reference in writing a college paper and for my own information. The book itself was in top condition for a used book. I was very pleased with it.

One of the best works of non-fiction I have read. The breadth of the author is staggering: anthropology, history, genetics, linguistics, biology, climatology, geology, sociology, and other fields I don't know the names for. All of these disparate yet interrelated fields are woven into a single narrative about the ultimate reasons behind the radically different developmental paths taken by the worlds civilizations. A plausible, scientifically-based explanation of issues I have contemplated for years, which simultaneously deconstructs the commonly held theory that genetics had a role in the advancement (or not) of peoples. The author explains why native Tasmanians never left the stone age (and indeed reverted to so-called inferior technologies), how Great Britain became a world power, why the native cultures in pre-Colonial North America were technologically moribund and not only illiterate but making no progress towards the development of written language, and how that same North American continent then came to house the most advanced civilization in the history of human kind (my assessment of America, not his). A must-read for anyone who has ever pondered the great question of human history and pre-history.

What can I say about this book that has not been written already? It seams the author has a view then went out to write a book that proves this view. Interesting ideas but there is not one chapter that would prove his theory wrong. I find that odd that everything points to him being right.

The critiques of Guns, Germs, and Steel show it is a very controversial book: many reviews, very long, very incisive.

The main idea of the book ¯ that history on the largest scale is determined by geography and biology ¯ I have never seen presented so thoroughly. Diamond analyzes suites of plant and animal species available for domestication, and shows how the combinations gave some cultures inestimable advantages over those less endowed, which allowed them to abandon the wandering life-style of the hunter-gatherer, and use the food surplus to support indirect contributors who could build social and political structures, warfare organizations, alphabets, and technologies. A tremendous headstart over others.

He also shows how the orientation of the continents (Eurasia east-west, across a narrow batch of climates, the Americas and Africa north-south across a wide batch of climates) made it easy for agricultural discoveries to pass between Asia and Europe, but almost impossible for them to be disseminated on the other continents. And of course, it was agricultural advances that made all the others possible. Fascinating idea.

But so many faults.

Diamond combines Europe and Asia into "Eurasia", which may be acceptable as geography but not as history. The fact is that the Fertile Crescent (source of European culture) and China (Asian culture) are two very separate fonts of civilization, that led in very different directions, and combining them is unrealistic.

Several times he says the last Ice Age ended 13000 years ago. Now an Ice Age takes 100,000 years to build up, as icecaps advance south, and about 50,000 to melt back, and they are still melting. I don't think any geologist can say to within a millennium or so when the last ended or next will start, but it is clearly simplistic to insist on 13,000 years ago as the cusp between two Ice Ages. If it were, the Earth would have been detectably cooling over historical time, not warming.

The "Germs" part of GG&S is another oversimplification. If the settled peoples of the world gave the others animal-derived diseases like smallpox and influenza, the hunter-gatherers gave back anthrax, plague, and siphylis. The fact is that microbe transmission took a tremendous leap, in both directions, after the discovery of navigation, and all peoples were equally affected; but the civilized peoples were in a better position to study and confine disease. Diamond's text leaves the impression that Europeans deliberately used disease as a weapon, which he doesn't document.

Then there is the circular reasoning about domestication of animal and plant species. Certainly, the peoples of the crescent had a fortunate suite of plants and animals available to them, and this gave them a headstart (not a new idea), but other peoples had other groups available. But (Diamond says) the other groups were "undomesticable". Why undomesticable? Well, obviously, because they weren't domesticated! Diamond blames the plants and animals as "undomesticable", instead of blaming the people who failed to domesticate them. A case in point (which Diamond claims to address but never does) is the bison: the European bison ("wizent") was domesticated to give our cattle, but North Americans never domesticated the American version.

But the worst of GG&S is the bias. Apparently all historians and anthropologists are racist - except, of course, Diamond. In the nineteenth century, some European thinkers concluded that other races were intellectually inferior to Caucasians, but no one has thought that in the twentieth, which is when almost all of modern anthropology was worked out. Diamond's racist historians never existed - they are straw men, invented only to be maligned. I was particularly affronted by his view that examiners of intelligence tests, following WW II, "tried to show" that US blacks were less intelligent than whites. With thousands of test results pouring in over decades, they naturally analyzed them for whatever stats they could get. The tiny, but statistically-significant, difference between blacks and whites was discovered, but quickly attributed to flaws in the test structure, differences in education opportunities, and problems with administering the tests. It is obvious that racial differences in intelligence (if any) are infinitesimal in comparison with the range of differences within any one race. And now, so many people of all backgrounds have been thrown together into the modern work pool that it is quite obvious that anyone can do anything. There are winners and losers, still, of course, but not because of race. Everyone has known this for half a century, but Diamond tries to make it racist, to make something offensive out of it.

If Diamond had ignored his predjudices and focussed on his technical material, GG&S would be a better book.

ever since my anthropology teacher assigned me this book in high school its been one of my favorite books. jared diamond gives an excelent discription of how human societies have developed in so many different ways.

Great book! If you're going to say anything about politics you kind of have to read this book. Which is a shame because it's really long and hard. I nearly threw it on the floor about ten times because I was so sick of reading about different cereal crops and locations. But you know how it is -- you have to include a lot of proof if you're not going to say that rich white nations really deserve to be that way cos of their skills and hard work.

Apparently, if you can put together a couple of hundred pages arguing all races of people are equal, awards committees all over the globe are going to be tripping over themselves to give you a prize. Jared Diamond, congratulations on the Pulitzer. Even so, Diamond's work is readable, informative, and makes excellent arguments that the world is the way it is today because of geography, specifically, that large land areas oriented east-west, like Euro-Asia, are more likely to expand their agricultural successes, and hence their population and influence, due to there being similar climates at similar latitudes, and the serendipity of high yield plants such as wheat and domesticable animals such as oxen, occurring in some regions and not others. And if the differences are from these environmental factors, than they certainly cannot be from race. Had the Aborigines wondered to the Fertile Crescent and the Caucasians to Australia a few thousand years ago, then today the Aborigines would be suffering the guilt of Western Civilization while the Caucasians live happily in the Outback. Diamond may be right, but he certainly doesn't hide the fact that, when it comes to race, he is anything but an unbiased researcher: "the objection to racial explanations is not just that they are loathsome". Unbiased researchers don't condemn a possible conclusion, or any conclusion, in the prologue as loathsome without tainting their objectivity and undermining their obligation to follow the facts wherever they may lead. Worse yet, while he asserts that all races are about equal, just subject to geography and serendipity, he can't help but to commit the same loathsome act he himself condemns by claiming New Guineans are of "superior intelligence." This aside, Guns, Germs, and Steel offers a fascinating look at the last fifty thousand years of brutal conquests by the technologically superior societies over the less advanced with genuine insights into the underlying reasons that made it possible.

It's big bulky and almost dry, but I got what I paid for and will eventually read through it.

I've read some of the negative reviews and would like to say something about a repeating assertion that the Incas only had two crops, potatos and maize (corn). The Incas cultivated around seventy crops, including grains, beans and fruits. More, in fact, than any other region in the world. Their conquerers were only interested in a few of them and those are the ones we know about. Among the better known crops are lima beans, peppers, peanuts, sweet potatos, squash, quinoa and tomatoes. Salsa is an Incan original. There are also reviewers who claim the natives of Mexico grew mostly maize. Their agriculture was pretty diverse too.

If I made a online purchase my concern would be the shipping.I have some worst exp with shipping but this surprised me.It came to me like shipped from next door and the book was in perfect condition.

I read the book while waiting for jury duty.It seamed very interesting but after a while i felt like i was reading the same thing over and over. After a while i just got bored of the book.

A real reviewer once wrote: "Jared Diamond is suspected to be a pseudonym for a committee of experts". He (or she) had a point. Jared Diamond's book "Guns, germs and steel" could very well be re-titled The Book About Everything. It's a very ambitious undertaking. Essentially, the author wants to explain the main lines of human history for the past 15,000 years!

The book is very interesting, and I don't doubt that Diamond is right on many points. However, I also suspect that he is just as wrong on many others. Indeed, I found myself agreeing with the author all the way until the epilogue, where he fell flat to his face. Diamond became charcoal, as it were. Still, Jared Diamond should be commended for at least trying to analyze the big issues of human history and prehistory. In that sense, "Guns, germs and steel" is a must read. (Incidentally, I know that Jared Diamond is a high-ranking professor. That just makes it more fun disagreeing with him, don't you think?)

[THE QUESTIONS ADRESSED BY THE BOOK]

"Guns, germs and steel" addresses the following questions. First, why did most high cultures appear in Eurasia and North Africa? Indeed, why did the first high cultures appear in these regions? Second, why where the Eurasian and North African high cultures more technologically advanced, and developed faster, than the high cultures that did appear in sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas? Third, why did no high culture ever appear in pre-colonial Australia? (I'm using the term "high culture" in a neutral sense. It's simply a culture with cities, an advanced division of labour, technology, etc.)

Diamond believes that the reasons are geographical and environmental, rather than genetic or "racial". He often explicitly argues against racist arguments. This may strike a sophisticated European reader as somewhat strange, until one remembers that the racist work "The Bell Curve" was a best seller in the United States only a few years before "Guns, germs and steel" was published. Diamond doesn't like to be called an environmental determinist, but it's hard to resist the temptation to call him precisely that. At the very least, he is strongly influenced by such ideas.

[THE ROLE OF DOMESTICATED ANIMALS AND PLANTS]

Diamond points out that many species of animals and plants in Eurasia could be domesticated. By comparison, very few animals and plants in America, Africa and Australia could be domesticated. There were no large mammals in America and Australia at all. Africa is teeming with large mammals but, by a curious accident, virtually none can be domesticated. Attempts to domesticate zebras or antelopes have all failed. This means that Eurasia got a head start in developing agriculture and the kind of massive food production necessary to sustain a high culture.

Eurasia also got the better deal in terms of technology. Domestic animals are needed to pull wagons. The wheel was therefore invented in Eurasia. The Aztec empire didn't have large domesticated animals (none were available), so naturally they never invented wheels. (Except as a toy for children.) In the same way, domestication of animals also paved the way for military success. Europeans and Asians had a cavalry. The Aztecs and Incas had none, and where thus quickly overwhelmed by the Spanish. Diamond points out, somewhat sarcastically, that if rhinos could be domesticated, Africans would have conquered the world!

Another factor is germs. Many epidemic diseases originally comes from "our" animals. Europeans therefore had a certain immunity against diseases such as smallpox, whereas American Indians had none. The defeats of both the Aztecs and the Incas were made easier by smallpox epidemics, to which the Spaniards had a higher immunity. (Conversely, one of the reasons why it took Europeans so long to conquer Africa or reach the interior of New Guinea, was European non-resistance to malaria.)

[GEOGRAPHICAL FACTORS FAVOURING DIFFUSION, etc]

Another factor favouring Eurasia is the east-west orientation of the vast Eurasian landmass. This made it easy for domesticated plants from the Middle East to be introduced into southern Europe, India or China. All these areas have basically the same climate. It's also (relatively) easy to travel between Europe and Asia, facilitating cultural diffusion. America, by contrast, has a north-south orientation. Also, the various parts of the Americas are more isolated from each other due to various geographical factors. This made cultural diffusion more difficult. When the Spanish landed in Peru and attacked the Inca empire, the Incas apparently had no idea that Mexico had already been conquered by Spain! The Inca ruler Atahuallpa naively assumed that Pizarro was just a raider who could be bought off with gold. He never realized that the conquistadors were there to stay.

Diamond also points out that Australia and some parts of North America were unsuitable for agriculture, or at least for advanced agriculture. This explains why the Aborigines never developed a high culture. The hunter-gatherer lifestyle was the only feasible one under Australian conditions. Unless, of course, you have *already* developed a high culture, which could then simply be transplanted to Australia, as the English eventually did. The White explorers who attempted to cross Australia's hinterland fared less well than the Aborigines, since their technology couldn't help them in the outback. As for the Tasmanians, their extremely low level of technology is due to Tasmania's isolation from the rest of the world. Other isolated cultures also regressed technologically. The Chapham Islands is another example.

But what about cultural factors? Diamond believes that some cultures are indeed more conservative, while others are more innovative. Here, he strays from "environmental determinism", since he attributes these factors to local idiosyncrasies. However, the sheer number of cultures that can be reached by cultural diffusion is presumably higher in Eurasia than in America or Australia. Therefore, cultural innovation will nevertheless be more likely in a Eurasian context than in the others.

[A PROBLEMATIC EPILOGUE]

So far, I think Diamond has made an eloquent case. The problem comes in the epilogue, where he tries to wrap up his theory, and connect the broad geographic-environmental perspective with questions about contingency, the role of individuals in world history, etc. He never really succeeds in this. In this last section of the book, Diamond also attempts to answer a fourth question: Why did the western part of the Eurasian landmass, the backwater known as Europe, eventually overtake not only America, Africa and Australia, but also Asia? After all, China, India and the Muslim world had an enormous head start compared to Europe. Then, something happened, around AD 1500.

To Diamond, Europe's eventual dominance over Asia can also be explained by environmental and geographic factors. This is not convincing at all. He is right to point out that the decentralized character of 15th century Europe actually worked in Columbus' favour, since he could lobby a large amount of kings and princes with his proposal for a westward voyage to "India". In China, by contrast, the centralized form of government proved disadvantageous to Chinese expansionism - when the emperor ordered that China shouldn't expand, that was it. The problem is that Diamond explains the centralization of China and the decentralization of Europe as inevitable consequences of geography. I beg to disagree. I consider it a contingent fact.

Europe was united for centuries by the Romans. Diamond writes that "only" half of Europe was under Roman control. True, but surely it was the better half! What if the Muslims had defeated Charles Martell or (much later) conquered Vienna? Then, large parts of Europe would once again have become "united". Diamond also writes that Napoleon and Hitler never united Europe. I don't know much about the Napoleonic wars, but Hitler *did* come very close to winning World War Two. There simply aren't any major geographical obstacles to uniting the important parts of Europe. Conversely, there have been periods in Chinese history when China was divided in many small states. That decentralization worked in Colombus' favour was also a contingent fact. After all, the Catholic monarchs of Spain almost rejected him as well. And what if the Europeans had decided to appease the Ottomans instead of fighting them? Then, Europe would have lost interest in westward journeys. Another curious argument put forward by the author is that deforestation in the Middle East made the centre of power move westward, to Greece and Rome, and then to northern Europe. This is a blatantly Euro-centric argument: in reality, Persia was just as strong as the Roman Empire, the Arabs were stronger than the "empires" of medieval Europe, and the Ottoman Empire was strongest during the 16th century, and it was still quite powerful two centuries later.

Thus, I can't see how "macroevolutionary" factors of geography or environment can explain why Europe managed to get ahead of the Muslims, Indians and Chinese.

Finally, there seems to be curious tendency in Jared Diamond's later book "Collapse" to reverse environmental determinism in favour of a different perspective, zooming in on various idiosyncratic cultural factors.

Still, I regard Professor Diamond (or should I call him Jared?) as a highly erudite and stimulating author, and recommend his books to everyone interested in world history.

Through an insightful synthesis of clues from diverse fields including archeology, geography, climatology, cultural anthropology, linguistics and ecosystem science, Jared Diamond's lucid and thought-provoking Guns, Germs, and Steel offers a comprehensive "bedrock to topsoil" explanation of trends in human settlement patterns over the past 13,000 years since the most recent Ice Age. The unifying theme is that the basic geography of the continents has been the key long-run driver behind differences in the rate of innovation and economic progress among societies around the globe.

Favorable environmental conditions inherent in Eurasia's latitudinal east-west continental geography fostered a richer, more varied ecosystem that provided higher availability of wild ancestral high-calorie plants and large animals that could be domesticated, thereby predisposing its human inhabitants to develop agriculture and technology, a written language, political organization, weaponry, higher population densities and, inadvertently, infectious diseases originating from mutating animal viruses, all of which gave Eurasian societies a head start and competitive advantage over early inhabitants of the other continents--Africa, North and South America and Australia--each of which has a longitudinal north-south profile or is more isolated from the other continents. Essentially, according to the thesis, geography-based fate, more than any significant difference in raw intelligence or ability across ethnic groups, has skewed the wealth distribution and technical advances towards certain European powers and their offshoots, notably the U.S., and Asian nations, historically China and more recently Japan.

The appeal of Diamond's explanation is its foundation in behind-the-scenes natural forces that influence outcomes over broad expanses of time and distance, without having to rely more arbitrarily on one-time events and circumstances that often assign undue importance to individual leaders and "great man" figures to explain the observed flow of human history. Like a theory in the sciences, Diamond's thesis is constructed to be logically consistent with the past; however, its inherent weakness is its lack of meaningful predictive power over a short enough future timeframe to enable testability. As Diamond acknowledges, in our modern world with same-day air travel to anywhere on the globe and the Internet providing practically instantaneous communication, "One might even wonder whether the geographical reasoning employed throughout this book has at last become wholly irrelevant in the modern world. . . ."

Consequently, although Diamond's explanation of how certain human societies (and, more controversially, ethnicities) have come to dominate others is profoundly satisfying, it provides us with very limited guidance about which continents, countries or ethnic groups are likely to have a relative advantage in the centuries and millennia ahead. My own guess is that, over the past 500 years since Columbus "discovered" America, human societies have undergone a "phase transition" which has created greater interconnectedness, placing us all for survival purposes in the "same boat" on spaceship Earth, so that "soft" factors, such as cultural values, education and the environmental choices societies make--not "hard" factors such as geography, germs and territorial clashes of societies against one another--will be the primary determinants of human progress and relative advantage among societies in the 21st century and beyond.

I was very excited to read this book and then very disappointed. It captured my attention for about half the book. The author makes several points that he supports with some evidence and then retells them over and over and over. Some of it is interesting but most is not the third or fourth time around. I read a lot and I will not finish this book.

When Guns, Germs and Steel was released several years ago I dismissed it as a pop history book. But, recently a friend described the book to me and I was intrigued.

In the 1970's Jarred Diamond was walking along a beach in Papua New Guinea when he met and talked with a local tribal politician called Yali. In their conversation, Yali asked Diamond why it was that Europeans had become so developed, when his people had not. This book is a very thorough answer to that question; describing how tribes and bands of hunter gatherers became farmers who formed complex societies; and why Europe won.

I just wish I had read this book when it came out.

I found the content of this book absolutely fascinating and thought-provoking. However, it took me forever to finish it. Maybe it's Diamond's writing style, maybe it is the repetition, but this book was much harder to get through than it should be. Maybe Jared Diamond needs a better editor?

Diamond has omitted a very crucial aspect of germs: How did Changez Khan, a desert dweller, The armies of Early desert dwelling Muslims, The Aryans of the cold deserts of Central Asia all overpower and conquer big, huge and very powerful civilizations of their times?

Civilizations originated near rivers and in warm places on earth. Moisture and warmth can support huge masses of humans as well as house flies, mosquitoes and other insects that cause diseases of crowds like malaria, cholera, TB etc. These diseases cause so many deaths among people of densely populated civilizations that the surviving masses are left with plenty of food to eat and therefore they don't have to fight to snatch food for survival.

In deserts the situation is entirely the opposite. There is very little moisture. Temperatures are extremely hot or cold. Land is mostly barren. And there is very little food there. Such habitats are not suitable for insects and there are not many house flies and mosquitoes around and consequently diseases and epidemics are not so common there.

But humans do live there on those very scarce resources that deserts can offer. In the absence of killing diseases they multiply like rabbits and soon would die en masse if nature hadn't evolved for them another mechanism of balancing the population with the, more or less, constant and meager resources of the deserts: Constant warfare, killing and looting.

You will never find centralized governments in deserts that are and remain isolated from large civilizations. Small tribes and clans live in a tribal system under laws customs and traditions which are there to promote and glorify fighting and killing and looting. The desert therefore becomes a natural training ground where all the male populations are transformed into very good warriors and fearless soldiers.

These warriors though are confined to inter tribal warfare inside the desert itself and civilizations outside are immune to their destructive power for hundreds of years until a great man is born among them in whom are combined exceptional leadership skills with those of a warrior general.

If and whenever this leader succeeds to pull out his desert men from internal conflicts and unites them under a single flag, he is ready to march his armies out of the deserts and out of hunger to annihilate the well fed and soft and clumsy armies of large civilization and to conquer, plunder and loot.

Changez Khan of The Mongols was such a great leader. So was Mohammad (Peace Be Upon Him), the prophet of Islam. And, so was HE who led the Aryans out of the cold deserts of Central Asia and Massacred and annihilated the indigenous populations of India and settled his own people there as the new and permanent inhabitants.

This pattern is so regular that it was worthy of mention by Jared diamond.
The pattern of desert dwelling peoples fighting internally for hundreds of years to become hardened killing machines and then come out of the desert under the leadership of a great leader to subjugate rich and haughty civilizations
This regular pattern of civilizations succumbing to the onslaught of united nomads' armies started from the very first civilization of Mesopotamia and carried on for the next ten thousand years until Changez Khan.

Now though civilization has grown out of its infancy and has entered into its phase of maturity since the renaissance of Europe which saw an explosion in education, science, technology and industrialization. Whereas previously there was not much difference in the types of weapons with which both sides fought against each other, deserts men vs. civilizations' armies and the bravery and chivalry of individual soldiers engaged in face to face combat that decided victory and defeat, now it's the superior technology of weapons that alone decides who will win if these two old enemies march into the battlefield in these modern times. Civilizations have discovered the institutions of schools, colleges, universities, research laboratories, factories and big industrial set ups along with many other important institutions that, working together, keep supplying ever more and more advanced weapons of combat to their own armies thereby giving them the edge and advantage over desert peoples who just don't have the resources and the manpower to build this huge and resource hungry set up.
Ten thousand years after its birth civilization has at the long last won this war once and forever against the allied armies of desert nomads. It has forever become immune to the power of nomads who get united under great leaderships.
Now it is civilization against civilization in the battlefield that poses the greatest threat ever to our planet and our very survival. However this fact too is evolving towards betterment albeit at a snail's pace.

Despite this one single and yet a very serious shortcoming "Guns Germs and Steel" is one of my best reads for many years to come.

This is a remarkable and thought-provoking book, full of insights into our past.

At the end of the last ice age, in 11,000 BC, all peoples on all the continents were hunter-gatherers. Why the great subsequent differences? Biology? Different genetic endowments? No, it is not a matter of racial differences - there is only one human race, as Diamond shows.

Why did bronze tools appear early in parts of Eurasia, but late and only locally in the New World, and never in aboriginal Australia? Diamond answers that environmental geography lays down the conditions of economic and social development.

Eurasia is the world's largest and most diverse landmass. Diamond shows how its larger stock of domestic plants and animals gave it the lead, starting in southwest Asia's Fertile Crescent. Big-seeded annual cereals, like wheats (emmer and einkorn) and barley, were easy to domesticate, and Eurasia's wheats have a higher protein content than East Asia's rice or the New World's corn.

Eurasia also had the largest number of wild mammalian species, 72 candidates for domestication. There were 14 ancient species of big herbivorous domestic animals: 13 were confined to Eurasia, one to South America. There were none in North America, Australia or sub-Saharan Africa. Eurasia had the unique combination of domesticable animals - sheep, goats, cows, pigs and dogs. Also, Eurasia's east-west axis enabled a swifter spread of crops and livestock across its 10,000-mile band of temperate latitudes.

The ultimate cause of progress - food production - led to the proximate causes - germs, literacy, technology and centralised government. Guns, germs and steel are power factors.

But Diamond underestimates how empires seized their given advantages to attack, conquer and exploit other less fortunate peoples. And he tends to justify the current inequitable world order, as when he writes of, "revolts ... promising less oppression ... all the misery still being caused by such struggles in the modern world."

I have read and enjoyed all of Diamond's books. This one, if not the best, of his works. Ignore the PBS video, it misses the details, and the details are what makes this thesis so compelling.

The book came on time and on perfect condition, I will buy from this provider again in the future. Also very thanful in my purchase from him.

I bought this book as it was recommended by the Economist which is one of the few sources I trust for book reviews. I was pretty disappointed. The first thing the author does is go overboard to establish is liberal and open minded bona fides, doing this by assuring the reading audience hes going to base his finding on reasoned and balanced treatment; devoid of racial bias or supposition. He then sets up classic straw man arguments promising his theories are more advanced then those numerous evolutionary psychologists and evil anthropologists that dare to foolishly use race as a criteria for judging human societal development. Diamond, then guiltily, bemoaning these ills and the numerous bogeyman that fill academia (preaching racial differences as if anyone looking to retain their career or University job would dear, i.e "The Bell Curve").

After all this and more pretense Diamond then goes on to say he finds primitive tribesman more intelligent on average then whites. Its hard at this point to determine which is more ridiculous: that the author just spent 20 pages bemoaning the insufferable inference that some racist fools may make against racial intelligence difference and its relation to societal development and then the author hypocritically doing exactly that himself. Or Diamonds specious and vapid analysis of why the primitive island natives are smarter then western whites. Appearantly inteligence counts for nothing in evolutionary biology in developed western societes compared to primitive ones, and putatively it takes more brain power to survive dieases in a primitive culture then a developed one. O'Really? I wouldnt be adversie to his premise if it wasnt based on the most feeble of analysis. He also throws out the old lib standard country natural resource argument which I thought was beyond mentioning since they have been so thoroughly discredited.

All this nonsense occured within the first 30 pages which proved two things for me:

1. The author is a huge liberal with the typical white guilty conscious and any analysis will be the poisoned pathological fruit of his inner guilt.
2. Diamonds analysis skills are suspect even if you accepted his premise.

Given these two points the statistical chance of this book being worth finishing when I had a full list of more thoughtful and well reasoned reads was greatly diminished. I decided to shelf Diamonds book. I have heard he has authored a even more biased and poorly reasoned environmental book which im sure blames white people for all the worlds ills but I'm not buying that one after wasting my time on this juvenile and silly book.

the audio book was sent very quickly and the condition of this audio is in great condition. i would recommend to order from this seller.

I'll keep it short. If you were to begin reading this book with the crazy notion that you would be enjoying a history on Guns, Germs and Steel, you're in for a surprise.

Fortunately I was still somewhat interested in Evolution, Archaeology and Agriculure, because it had almost nothing to do with Guns, Germs and Steel. It spent 90% of the time fascinated with the events of the world 30,000 years ago, made mabe 1 or 2 mentions of a gun, spent a half of a chapter on germs, and I think the author somehow forgot about steel all together.

The title was madly decieving, but the book was still a decent read overall with some interesting theories about evolution.

There are already many good reviews to this book, so I will only suggest reading the following books in addition to this work on the vexing question of why Western countries have dominated the world during the last few centuries [the very way the question is posed is controversial!]: 1) "Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium" by Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O'Rourke; 2)"The Great Divergence", by Kennetz Pomeranz; 3 - 4): "The world economy. A millennial perspective" (2001) plus "The world economy: Historical Statistics" (2003) by Angus Maddison (a combined edition of these two volumes appeared on December 2007); 5) "Why Europe Was First: Social Change and Economic Growth in Europe and East Asia, 1500-2050" by Erik Ringmar; and 6) "The Origins of Capitalism and the «Rise of the West»" by Eric H. Mielants.

The book itself was in the condition stated by the seller, but the shipment took over two weeks.

Man. I was waiting weeks for the hardcover edition to come into stock so I just decided to buy the paperback. Then, right after I order, the hardcover comes in stock. I HATE FREAKIN AMAZON. AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH

Jared Diamond's thesis is a product of the age we live in. He's more than happy to attribute negative values such as greed and avarice to European conquerors but certainly other cultural values, specially any that might be positive, play no role in Diamond's story. Instead of painting a historically complex picture (as genuine history tends to be), Diamond over plays the "location is everything" (geographical) argument, as if the geography argument answers every inequality amongst nations. Diamond is a fine apologist for the self-hating descendants of Europeans who are in vogue on college campuses these days, but his thesis tells a very distorted and very shallow version of history. If you have to have this book, a used copy will inflict the least pain.

Simply stated: This book is a must read. With all the reviews out there I won't go into detail except to say that this book covers very important principles that outline the general story of human history. Is it a little too long? Yes. Is it a little too repetative? Yes. Is Diamond's controversial suggestion that 'underdeveloped countries may produce smarter people because they have to be smarter just to survive' just plain dumb? Yes. But, that topic only covers about one or two pages and in no way damages the overall theme of his book (so I would suggest ignoring that point). Furthermore, to balance out this book with some additional views I would suggest reading 'The Central Liberal Truth' and 'Carnage and Culture' - these are NOT competing views - just additional perspectives on what can simply be described as the ultimate explanation of why some peoples/ cultures/ countries have survived/ dominated/ propogated and others have not.
I highly recommend this book.

This book contains a number of fascinating historical stories and studies on the evolution of civilized society. The opening discussion of the battle at Cajamarca between the Spaniards and Incas, including translated first-hand accounts, is both riveting and thought-provoking.

The book suffers from two main defects. First, the author spent most of his career working in New Guinea and too frequently uses this direct and narrow experience to add credibility to a more general assertions about other societies. These provincial interruptions sometimes interrupt the flow of an otherwise fine exposition.

Second, the author seems intent to refute the idea that the current state of human society - with widely varying adoption of technology and social standards i different geographical areas - is the consequence of mathematically closed-form natural laws which can be employed to predict not only history from first principles, but future societal trends. This may be a commonly held belief in some backwards social science departments, but has already been widely discredited. The authors tilting at this windmill is sometimes tedious.

It's worth mentioning the contrast between this book and Darwin's Origin of Species. The latter still seems intellectually fresh, despite its elaborate detail and minor errors in thinking. Darwin's thoughts are shaped by his travels but not limited by them.

A wonderfully insightful book. Diamond is brilliant in explaining why and how history has played out, on a broad scale, the way it has. It's not hard to see why he was awarded the Pulitzer for this.

-Colin Gershon