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 Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, New Edition :: 0393061310
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| Explaining what William McNeill called The Rise of the West has become the central problem in the study of global history. In Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond presents the biologist's answer: geography, demography, and ecological happenstance. Diamond evenhandedly reviews human history on every continent since the Ice Age at a rate that emphasizes only the broadest movements of peoples and ideas. Yet his survey is binocular: one eye has the rather distant vision of the evolutionary biologist, while the other eye--and his heart--belongs to the people of New Guinea, where he has done field work for more than 30 years. Editorial Descriptions are usually submitted by the manufacturers, publishers and authors. Contact us if you are one of them, and wish to change the above description. |
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Author: Guest
Diamond presents too few facts and too many of his personal opinions. He does this by going on and on, often being repetitive, and taking up far too many pages to get his unproven ideas across. For every one of his ideas, he ignores thousands of other possibilities. It appears he chose to present the liberal leaning ideas. Diamond is obviously a liberal. This should tell you what causes he is trying to advance. For all we know, he may have conspired with Rob "Meathead" Reiner when writing his book. For liberal thinkers, the book should strengthen your resolve. For the rest of us, most of it is boring liberal rubbish.
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Author: Guest
I purchased this book before vacation based on a recoomendation of a friend. We obviously have very different tastes in books. I found the book extremely dry and tedious, with no interest to me at all.
Counting on the fact that different people have different tastes, I left the book on a chair at the Philadelphia airport for someone to find and hopefully appreciate. I was not about to lug it around Europe for 2 weeks.
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Author: Guest
In this single volume, Jared Diamond, professor of physiology and geography at UCLA, attempts to outline history's broadest pattern. He takes as his subject matter everything that has happened on all continents for the last 13,000 years. In 11,000 BC, at the end of the last Ice Age, all societies were on equal footing, existing as bands of preliterate hunter-gatherers. Yet by 1532 AD the Spanish conquistador Pizarro with 169 men was able to travel across thousands of miles of ocean and conquer the Incas at Cajamarca in spite of being vastly outnumbered. The poximate causes were guns, germs, and steel. However, this book is more concerned with ultimate causes, that is to say, broader patterns. Diamond finds the answer in geography and environmental endowment.
The title is a little perplexing since the thesis that Diamond is setting forth does not explain proximate causes, it deals with more remote causation. For example, it explains why Europe was the most wealthy and powerful continent in 1500, but it doesn't explain why it was the Spanish that conquered the Incas or the Aztecs for that matter, or why, for example, Great Britain was the most powerful European country in 1850.
Diamond tells us that the key to understanding human history is food production. The parts of the world that were endowed with a wide variety of domesticable plants and animals and a geography favorable to their migration and diffusion had clear advantages over other societies. There were some excellent chapters in this book on the origins of agriculture. He describes all the benefits of the domestication of large animals and their living in close proximity with human beings. This happened extensively in Europe and China, providing these populations with immunities to various diseases over the course of centuries. Agriculture led to more complex stratified societies with central government, writing, iron tools, standing armies, etc. It was for this reason - food production - that the world's most wealthy and powerful societies originated on the Eurasian continent.
Diamond flatly rejects the notion that some societies were either culturally or racially superior. Some critics have simply called this political correctness, while others claim he is merely reinforcing Eurocentrism by claiming it was geographically inevitable. True, Diamond argues that any cultural or technological advantage was rooted in geography and environmental richness. But within the parameters of that determinism, historical actors still have considerable room to fail or succeed. Europeans have been ascendent for the last 500 hundred years; this does not mean that there position is somehow guaranteed. In the last twenty years there has been an enormous transfer of wealth, technology, and power to China and India, it appears they may soon achieve great power status.
Most historians do not work on the scale that Diamond does. Instead of continents and millenium, they choose narrower geographic areas with much shorter time frames. Most historians also, from a much more proximate point of view, see history in terms of human ideas and conscious human actions, rather than a series of responses to the environment. Diamond has neglected, for example, to explain the emergence of modern science and its impact on societies. He also neglects to explain the impact of relgion, other than as a mere handmaiden of the state. In his attempt to achieve a grand theory of history he ulitimately fails - as all those before him have.
Nevertheless , this is a monumental work of learning and originality, worthy of the Pulitzer Prize that it received. It is disingenuous for some reviewers to dismiss it as simply a theory of geographical determinism. It is much more, it spans a wide range of disciplines and it goes a long way in explaining the distribution of wealth and power among societies for the last 13,000 years.
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Author: Guest
Weapons, viruses and metal equipment managed the leadership of the European-American concept -- up to the year of 2000. However while one still is rubbing his hands, that China was taken off since the 14th century (Arabia since 15th), the tide can oppose nevertheless soon. At present, the technology and trade development of the Asian countries is enormously positive and the oil-possessing dominance of the Arabian states just increases her demand to a global (also ideological) con-design right. The threat factors "weapons, viruses and metal equipment," -- represented always into actor pose nicely by president George W. Bush, impressed with fight bomber pilot jacket, with legs apart and broad grinning on the deck of an US-aircraft-carrier -- this success conception perhaps really could gradually oppose her inventors: State armies get for example increasingly powerless against the guerilla unit tactics of the present global suicidal terrorism. Jared Diamond perhaps looks a little confused for the stability guarantee of the European-American success concept. The geographical situation alone is not a guarantor. As an advantage factor it does not suffice eternally. Jared Diamond looks to make believe for us that the capability to make innovations, the courage to accept competition, the openness for intermixing (causes biologically seen virus resistance, hello, bird flu) -- that these factors will safeguard the further dominance of the European-American concept. He does not like to argue racialistly, religion critically or militaristically, although: The Indians of North- and South-America felt actually quite good without the missionaries and swords, railways and colts of the white ones; in addition, we do not see Diamond's remarks on drunken and lazy workers of non-white skin color (but some Afro-American reviewers do). [The factor "genocide" Jared Diamond does not examine, but in his follow-up book "Collapse" he analyzes how the Hutus murdered the Tutsis in Rwanda - avoiding the own nest soiling examples of how the American Indians lost their lives]. As an environmentalist, doubts come to the professor at the university of California , however, because of ruthless practices (so he worries in "Collapse" about some elks turned ill in Montana, toxins of a mine seeped into the ground there). Jared Diamond is uncertain and broods. We perhaps too.
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Author: Guest
I read this book when it first came out. I'm very interested in pre-history and the relationship with the evolution of man and the environment, and a fan or former Diamond books. I read it and I liked it. It is well done.
Why am I reviewing it now? Because more and more as I read magazine articles, histories, discussions of global warming and avian flu, Diamond's book and the theoretical framework he develops is referenced.
Diamond's thesis is that the wide trends of human history were heavily influenced (determined is too strong a word) by geographic and environmental factors. He draws on the theory of Island Biogeography (read Song of the Dodo for a great popular account) to say that people on the large Eurasian landmass had intrinsic advantages over those on the other continents, including exposure to germs that strengthened their immune systems, lots of domesticable plants and animals etc.
Not everyone agrees with this analysis, but everyone is having to react to it.
The obvious criticisms of the theory are that it is applying a backwards pattern on historical expediency and deriving inevitability. It also has been seen by a few as yet another attempt to justify the unique position of Europeans and their descendents in the world...with all the possible related racism thereby "excused". I believe Diamond escapes these traps through good exposition, even-handedness and sensitivity.
4.5 stars.
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