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Dec 16, 2009

Mike rated it:

Author Jared Diamond's two-part thesis is: 1) the most important theme in human history is that of civilizations beating the crap out of each other, 2) the reason the beat-ors were Europeans and the beat-ees the Aboriginees, Mayans, et. al. is because of the geographical features of where each civilization happened to develop. Whether societies developed gunpowder, written language, and other technological niceties, argues Diamond, is completely a function of whether they emerged amidst travel- More...

8 comments like (34 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Jim rated it:

The Purist

I give you now Professor Twist,
A conscientious scientist,
Trustees exclaimed, "He never bungles!"
And sent him off to distant jungles.
Camped on a tropic riverside,
One day he missed his loving bride.
She had, the guide informed him later,
Been eaten by an alligator.
Professor Twist could not but smile.
"You mean," he said, "a crocodile."

That bit of Ogden Nash whimsy came into my head as More...

4 comments like (18 people liked it)

Apr 06, 2008

Joshua rated it:

In 1532, Francisco Pizarro and a band of 168 Spaniards punctured the heart of the Inca Empire and proceeded to capture its emperor, decimate its citizens, and plunder its gold. Why didn’t it happen the other way around? Why didn't the Incas sail to Europe, capture Charles V, kill his subjects, and loot his castles and cathedrals? Jared Diamond attempts to answer this question in Guns, Germs & Steel.

Why have Europeans tended to dominate other peoples on other continents? Does it have More...

3 comments like (28 people liked it)

Sep 04, 2007

Radhika rated it:

I give this book 4 stars because it has some very interesting ideas that provoke thought and inquiry. It also offers plausible explanations that often ring true. I don't give it 5 stars because it suffers from certain drawbacks.

I love his analysis and interpretation of causes that show why civilization arose variously in diverse and distinct locations of the planet. I love how his causes make sense. His rejection of race-based politics is quite clear. I like
how his explan More...

0 comments like (12 people liked it)

Nov 22, 2008

Molly rated it:

This is what happens when you take an intelligent person, and casually make a few mentions of a field of study they have no knowledge of.

Mr. Diamond, NOT an anthropologist, takes Marvin Harris' theory of cultural materialism and uses it to explain everything in life, history, and the current state of the world.

Materialism is a way of looking at human culture which, for lack of a better way to explain it easily here, says that people's material needs and goods determine be More...

15 comments like (21 people liked it)

Jan 21, 2008

Elizabeth rated it:

Germ Guns & Steel

It is a thesis,
His thesis being; that all animals are created equal… but not all animals sleep in a bed with sheets.
Why?
Because in addition to needing tree for wood to make looms, herders to shear sheep & weavers to make sheets, you also need (DHU) SHEEP.
Yep, if you are unlucky enough to be born on a continent or onto part of a continent with only anteaters, there is no fucking way you are going to get sheets, no matter how smart you are.
More...

3 comments like (7 people liked it)

Sep 16, 2010

Alex rated it:

GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL: THE FATES OF HUMAN SOCIETIES BY JARED DIAMOND: This is one of those books that takes you a while to read -- it's pretty heavy non-fiction -- and yet at the end of it, you feel like Hippocrates, a Muslim scientist, or Leonardo Da Vinci must have felt at the realization of a great discovery. The Eureka! moment. This book is kind of like the movie Hotel Rwanda: the movie was life-altering for me, and just made every other movie that came out that year seem tawdry and unimpor More...

2 comments like (7 people liked it)

Jan 23, 2008

Deborah rated it:

Having read Charles C. Mann's 1491 immediately before Guns, Germs, and Steel, I was all-too aware of the dated nature of many of Diamond's assumptions about the New World. (And therefore I would highly recommend 1491 to anyone interested in learning about the latest and greatest developments in knowledge concerning the early history of the Americas.) This seed of doubt concerning the accuracy of Diamond's assumptions about the Americas prevented me from fully appreciating what he had to say ab More...

0 comments like (6 people liked it)

Dec 19, 2008

Manny rated it:

I liked this book, and it taught me a bunch of things I hadn't known before I read it. Jared Diamond has clearly had a more interesting life than most of us, and spent significant amounts of time in a wide variety of different kinds of society, all over the world. He says he got the basic idea from a conversation he had back in the 70s with a friend in New Guinea. His friend, who later became a leader in the independence movement, wanted to talk about "cargo" (manufactured goods, techn More...

2 comments like (10 people liked it)

Jun 01, 2008

Miriam rated it:

Well, I understand why this got a Pulitzer. I hope every student is having to read it in high school. I'm afraid they're not.

Although Diamond's main purpose is to answer the question "Why did the peoples of some continents conquer and dispossess others?" in a non-racist fashion (and succeeds convincingly), the book in many ways is a history of the world, and one less Eurocentric and less focused on irrelevant details than many whose point is explicitly trying to do th More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Mar 12, 2008

Curtis rated it:

Before buying and reading this book, I read some reviews, and frankly, they didn't inspire me. They talked about it being a history of the world, they talked about its immense, ambitious scope. Such talk causes my crap detectors to tingle. I did finally buy it after reading a laudatory review by someone I respect. And I'm glad I did, because I found it to be absolutely top notch. The phrase "history of the world" misguides because the book is entirely about pre-history. The story More...

0 comments like (6 people liked it)

Jan 15, 2008

Marissa rated it:

UPDATE: I closed the file on this one I had a dinner-party conversation last Friday that began with someone saying, "You know, almonds are one of the oldest domesticated plant species in the world." And I said, "Oh yeah! That's right! I think I learned that in 'Guns, Germs and Steel.'" And the other person said, "Oh yeah, I think you're right" (P.S. I'm paraphrasing), and we both sort of said, "Right before Jared Diamond put me to sleep." So, as you can se More...

2 comments like (11 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Trevor rated it:

Without overdoing the pun, everything by Diamond shines and shines. This is his greatest work. Occasionally in life you can feel a book shifting the way you see the world, shifting what you thought you knew about the world. There is a documentary made around this book, but read the book - trust me.

2 comments like (6 people liked it)

Dec 29, 2011

Will rated it:

Diamond seeks to dispel the myth that humans of different geographic and racial origins have inherently varying mental capabilities. The arguments he seeks to counter are those stating that since "civilization" came to full flower in the "western" countries (white) and not in places where other races dominated, that this indicated the innate superiority of Caucasians. He provides a stunning analysis of why civilization emerged in the places in which it did. He tells us of the More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jun 03, 2008

Rhiannon rated it:

I have this awesome picture in my head in which Jared Diamond did not write this book. He instead wrote a detailed, engaging account of the history of plant and animal domestication.

"But Rhiannon," you might say, "doesn't that remove his entire thesis, that geography determined just about everything about the course of human civilization?"

And, I would respond yes, it does.

"And, isn't that kind of removing the whole book?"

More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Sep 19, 2008

Flint rated it:

Guns, Germs and Steel is a good book, and I suggest you follow up with reading Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.

However, if you find yourself interested in primatology and evolutionary biology, I don't suggest you read Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee. Instead, I recommend Frans de Waal's Our Inner Ape, unlike Diamond, de Wall doesn't ignore Bonobos.

I do have one significant disagreement with Diamond, the degree which he is a material determinist. While I More...

5 comments like (2 people liked it)

Sep 09, 2010

Alessandra rated it:

"Guns Germs and Steel is about why the rise of complex human societies unfolded differently on different continents over the last 13,000 years"- Jared Diamond describing the nature of his work in the 2003 afterword

Diamond deserves credit for this great undertaking, yet there is most likely a reason behind the lack of such work in the historical field-as such a broad or universal approach to history often leads to oversimplification. Considering I am just beginning to specia More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Dec 13, 2011

Terry marked it as to-read

I'm sloshing my way through this very dense book. Hopefully I'll finish it someday.

4 comments like (2 people liked it)

Nov 25, 2008

Jefke rated it:

English at te bottom.

In het nederlands: "Zwaarden, paarden en ziektekiemen" Ik heb de Engelse versie gelezen.

Ik heb dit boek als luisterboek beluisterd ipv gelezen. Na het lezen van "Ondergang" of "Collapse", had ik trek naar meer Jared Diamond.
Een Papoease (autochtone) vriend van Jared vraagt hem waarom de Europeanen de wereld veroverd hebben en niet de Papoea of Indianen... Diamond toont in dit boek aan dat het niets met verschil in i More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 21, 2008

Julianne rated it:

My three-star rating has nothing to do with the quality of the ideas in this book; I think they're all top-notch. My lukewarm response has to do instead with their presentation.

Jared Diamond's prose is very readable but prolix. How, one might ask, could I find prolix a book which purports to condense the entire history of humankind into 425 pages? (As Diamond himself points out, compressing 13,000 years of history into roughly 400 pages works out to "an average of about one pag More...

1 comment like (4 people liked it)

Apr 30, 2008

Monica rated it:

I had to write a paper on this book for my first class in graduate school. I am going to look to see if I still have it...hold on...I am totally pasting it in:

“I’ve set myself the modest task of trying to explain the broad pattern of human history, on all the continents, for the last 13,000 years.” While Diamond’s explanation of his prize-winning book’s goal is clearly oversimplified, the impetus for writing the book is not: while doing research in New Guinea, a native friend named Y More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jun 05, 2008

Nate rated it:

This may be the most over-rated book in the history of book rating. The point he is making is that we in Western Civilazation haven't built skyscrapers, made Moon landings, mass produced automobiles, eradicated polio (or for that matter lived indoors with running water) while aborigines in certain remote outposts still hunt and gather in isolated tribes because we are inherently any smarter or more industrious than those individuals. Of course he is mostly right, but why is this considered suc More...

4 comments like (4 people liked it)

Mar 27, 2008

eric rated it:

Premise: The gaps in power and technology among modern human societies can be traced to environmental differences rather than cultural or racial ones.

I’m not smarter than a hunter-gatherer from Namibia. My ipod and rechargeable roomba aren’t indicators or badges of any sort of superiority. It’s just that in the last 13,000 years, my ancestors were located in places with access to larger animals that could be domesticated and where food could be cultivated. They also slept with eno More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Feb 06, 2008

Marty rated it:

When I was doing study abroad in Costa Rica, I wrote an essay that covered part of the ambitious theme that is tackled in Guns, Germs, and Steel. Little did I know at the time that Jared Diamond had addressed it in this comprehensive book--not only addressed it, but addressed it thoroughly, and, in fact, bordered on beating the topic to death ... bordered, but not crossed. When I later heard about the premise of Guns, Germs, and Steel, and since the topic of why Europeans had the edge up on othe More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

May 08, 2008

D.S. rated it:

In 800 some odd pages Jared Diamond sums up the biological and geographical history of humanity in order to prove that cultural dominance has nothing to do with race and everything to do with context. His theory is not new, rather, he assembles a number of common scientific truths about the evolution and survival of species into a comprehensive (although at points redundant) tome. It is one of the greatest syntheses of information that I have read and which was produced in the 27 years I have in More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 23, 2007

Ken rated it:

Guns, Germs, and Steel (GGS) is an illuminating and sweeping panorama of human history. It is thought-provoking, logical, and debunks racist theories by highlighting the undeniable significance of geographic and climatic influences on the developments and progressions of human societies.

For example, civilization and technology spread fastest throughout the Eurasian continent partly due its vast width and its east-west latitudinal axis, which allows for a fairly consistent temper More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Nov 12, 2007

Rob rated it:

This book is worth a look, despite its shortcomings. The author's basic premise is not merely instructive, but essential to an informed understanding of world history and the development of civilizations. According to Diamond, the technological, military, and economic gulf seperating Europe from the New World in the 16th century (and the disparities in our own world order) were due, not to any innate human abilities or lack thereof, but by factors largely out of human control. Namely, the ava More...

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Jul 06, 2007

Ian rated it:

This book was a life-changing book for me. I think I read it for the first time right when I needed to: I was ready to start wondering about many of the things I accept as "given" or "the way" without wondering "why" or "how." Diamond writes this historical text from a scientist's point of view; he is not a trained historian, but a trained biologist. That vantage point allows him, I think, to accumulate a lot of information and present it in a way that is More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 06, 2007

Tim rated it:

As a student of Geography, this book provided some much needed validation. Geography does matter! Hah!

While I loved this book, it did have some flaws. One is that I learned that I am not interested in linguistics. Every single time Diamond brought out the linguistic evidence, my eyes glazed over and didn't return to normal until that section was over. I had always thought the idea of linguistics was interesting and that I would like to know more. Turns out no.
My second problem More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Apr 09, 2007

nathan rated it:

This was an incredible book that covered an important topic: why are some societies rich and others poor? Jared Diamond discusses this point of view from a variety of angles and progresses the book in a systematic, logical way. He does neglect to include one of the most powerful forces in humanity - that of economics, which I feel makes the book significantly incomplete.

With that in mind, Jared's primary assertion is that societies are where they are in terms of wealth mainly beca More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)