The following I think might be of some interest was sent to me by a friend
and was taken off the Amazon.com web page. It is reviews and commentaries
of a new book by Jared Diamond, professor of physiology at the UCLA Medical
School, the author of "The Third Chimpanzee", called "Guns, Germs, and
Steel".=20
Best, Peter
[log in to unmask]
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Life isn't fair--here's why: Since 1500, Europeans have, for better and
worse, called the tune that the World has danced to. In Guns, Germs, and
Steel, Jared Diamond explains the reasons why things worked out that
way. It is an elemental question, and Diamond is not nearly the first to
ask it. However, he performs a singular service by relying on scientific
fact rather than specious theories of European genetic superiority.
Diamond, a professor of physiology at UCLA, suggests that the geography
of Eurasia was best suited to farming, the domestication of animals, and
the free flow of information. The more populous cultures that developed
as a result had more complex forms of government and communication--and
increased resistance to disease. Finally, fragmented Europe harnessed
the power of competitive innovation in ways that China did not. (For
example, the Europeans used the Chinese invention of gunpowder to create
guns and subjugate the New World.) Diamond's book is complex and a bit
overwhelming. But the thesis he methodically puts forth--examining the
"positive feedback loop" of farming, then domestication, then population
density, then innovation, and on and on--makes sense. Written without
favor, Guns, Germs, and Steel is good global history.
Science Editor's Recommended Book, 10/01/97:
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.
Paul R. Ehrlich, Bing Professor of Population Studies, Stanford
University:
This is a brilliantly written, passionate, whirlwind tour through 13,000
years of history on all the continents--a short history of everything
about everybody. The origins of empires, religion, writing, crops, and
guns are all here. By at last providing a convincing explanation for the
differing developments of human societies on different continents, the
book demolishes the grounds for racist theories of history. Its account
of how the modern world was formed is full of lessons for our own
future. After reading the first two pages, you won't be able to put it
down.=20
Alfred W. Crosby, Los Angeles Times 3/9/97:
Jared Diamond...is broadly erudite, writes in a style that pleasantly
expresses scientific concepts in vernacular American English and deals
almost exclusively in questions that should interest everyone concerned
about how humanity developed. . . .Reading Diamond is like watching
someone riding a unicycle, balancing an eel on his nose and juggling
five squealing piglets. You may or may not agree with him (I usually
do), but he rivets your attention.=20
Guns, Germs, and Steel is his answer to a question proffered by his New
Guinean friend, Yali: "Why is it that you white people developed so much
cargo [steel axes, umbrellas, matches, soft drinks, etc.- the material
stuff of civilization], but we black people had little cargo of our
own?" It is an obvious and important question, and one to which
professional historians, including myself, tend to react as if we'd
discovered a coral snake in the shower...we shy away from Yali's
question because the easiest answer is one that many bray and bray about
and others would rather die than utter. Race...
Jared Diamond had done us all a great favor by supplying a rock-solid
alternative to the racist answer...
...This is a wonderfully interesting book, especially for historians of
the usual liberal arts background, who will find the final chapter, "The
Future of Hisotry as a Science," alone worth the price of admission. In
it, Diamond argues that students of humanity- while they cannot be as
precise as physicists and chemists with their laboratory experiments,
nor can they run history over again to see if this change can produce
that result- have examples and "natural experiments" with which they can
fashion informative comparisons.=
Why did Christendom enthusiastically and permanently adopt the wheel,
the key element in most machinery, while the Islamic societies largely
discarded it? What happened when syphilis first appeared, as compared to
what is happening today with the appearance of AIDS? What is happening
to society in the highlands of Diamond's home-away-from-home, Paupa New
Guinea, where people have hurtled from the technology of the stone ax to
that of the computer within a lifetime? Diamond's lesson is this: Think
big like our astronomers, who begin their training not by trying to
understand the nervous gyrations of the members of the asteroid belt but
the simple and stately movements of the major planets over the years,
decades and centuries. Think big. "Guns, Germs, and Steel" is a
provocative start.
William H McNeil, The New York Review of Books, May 15, 1997:
Guns, Germs and Steel is an artful, informative and delightful
book...there is nothing like a radically new angle of vision for
bringing out unsuspected dimensions of subject and that is what Jared
Diamond has done.
David Brown, Washington Post Book World, May 11, 1997:
...[A] fascinating and extremely important book. Guns, Germs, and Steel
is a volume no one should leave college without reading. The major
argument, in simplified form, should be taught as early as grammar
school. That its insights seem so fresh, its facts so novel and
arresting, is evidence of how little Americans -- and I suspect, most
well-educated citizens of the Western world -- know of the most
important forces of human history.
In his book, Jared Diamond seeks to explain the course of human history
-- all but the last thousand years or so -- in less than 500 pages. It
is, needless to say, an ambitious project. And Diamond isn't even a
historian! He's a physiologist and an evolutionary biologist - and
therein lies the astounding power of his analysis.
Book Description:
A global account of the rise of civilization that is also a stunning
refutation of ideas of human development based on race.
Until around 11,000 b.c., all peoples were still Stone Age
hunter/gatherers. At that point, a great divide occurred in the rates
that human societies evolved. In Eurasia, parts of the Americas, and
Africa, farming became the prevailing mode of existence when indigenous
wild plants and animals were domesticated by prehistoric planters and
herders. As Jared Diamond vividly reveals, the very people who gained a
head start in producing food would collide with preliterate cultures,
shaping the modern world through conquest, displacement, and genocide.
The paths that lead from scattered centers of food to broad bands of
settlement had a great deal to do with climate and geography. But how
did differences in societies arise? Why weren't native Australians,
Americans, or Africans the ones to colonize Europe? Diamond dismantles
pernicious racial theories tracing societal differences to biological
differences.
He assembles convincing evidence linking germs to domestication of
animals, germs that Eurasians then spread in epidemic proportions in
their voyages of discovery. In its sweep, Guns, Germs and Steel
encompasses the rise of agriculture, technology, writing, government,
and religion, providing a unifying theory of human history as intriguing
as the histories of dinosaurs and glaciers.
Jared Diamond, professor of physiology at the UCLA Medical School, is
the author of The Third Chimpanzee, awarded the 1992 Los Angeles Times
Science Book Award. He is a regular contributor to Natural History and
Discover magazines and lives in Los Angeles.
Synopsis:
An intriguing study of the rise of civilization argues that human
development is not based on race or ethnic differences but rather is
linked to biological diversity, discussing the evolution of agriculture,
technology, writing, political systems, and religious belief. Tour.
Card catalog description
Why did Eurasians conquer, displace, or decimate Native Americans,
Australians, and Africans, instead of the reverse? In this
groundbreaking book, evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond stunningly
dismantles racially based theories of human history by revealing the
environmental factors actually responsible for history's broadest
patterns. Here, at last, is a world history that really is a history of
all the world's peoples, a unified narrative of human life even more
intriguing and important than accounts of dinosaurs and glaciers. A
major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and
Steel chronicles the way that the modern world, and its inequalities,
came to be. It is a work rich in dramatic revelations that will
fascinate readers even as it challenges conventional wisdom.
Customer Comments
[log in to unmask] from Dallas, Texas , 10/19/97, rating
Social Science Validates the Laws of Thermodynamics
Several years ago while on a business trip to Portland, Oregon, we were
given an informal tour of the Boeing Company's automated steel milling
facility. This is the place where all major steel components for the
entire Boeing product line are precisely milled by multi-tonned
computer-controlled cutting machines. Until that time, like a space-age
Yali, I wondered why B-747s were not produced in Uganda. A brief
description by our host of the complex processes and industrial
infrastructure that lead up to the arrival of the parts and materials at
the door of the Portland factory was a marvelous revelation. Dr.
Diamond's treatise captures the essence of that revelation and
articulates better than any I have seen.
Tim McDonough
PhD Student of Political Economy
University of Texas at Dallas
A reader from Portland, Oregon , 10/19/97, rating
Thought provoking
I read this book after becoming intrigued by the review it recieved from
the N.Y. Times. The question posed by the work is one that I have
wondered about on occasion but have never seen directly addressed;
namely, why have different societies reached widely varying levels of
comlexitiy and technolgical development? In exploring this question the
author puts together a logical and compelling history of human
civilizations. I was particularly interested in the theories of plant
and animal domesticaiton, and of the association of human diseases and
animal contact. The development of written language was also presented
in a fascinating manner. I came away from the book with a sense of awe
that human societies have evolved to the complexity that they have,
given the difficulties in achieving even seemingly simple goals such as
sustainable agriculture. It is rare to find a work as thought provoking
as this. My one criticism of the book is that there were times when
there was more repetition than necessary to make a point. This fact did
not interfere, however, with my enjoyment of the book.
[log in to unmask] from Commack, NY , 10/17/97, rating
Interesting Subject, but dry at times
I found that authors theories reminded me of PsycoHistory, the
discipline founded by Hari Sheldon, from Asimov's Foundation Series.
Maybe he's on to something....
AWR 96 @aol.com - (Larry Rosenfeld) from Highland Park, New Jersey ,
09/28/97, rating
Excellent telescopic view of human history
In his attempt to explain why Europeans became dominant, Diamond asks
and answers many questions along the way. He is very specific regarding
comparative geography, climate, availability of domesticable plants and
animals. Sometimes, in his willingness to address all questions Diamond
is forced to speculate. Even then, he is logical and provides as much
fact as he can to support his hypotheses.
In attempting to debunk racist theories, he demonstrates how Polynesian
societies became diverse because of diverse environmental factors
despite physical commonalities. There were hunter gatherers and
agricultural societies, conquerors and conquered.
The book is scholarly, well structured, very enjoyable and readable. It
progresses in such a way as to provoke questions and then goes on to
answer each one. A well developed reading list at the end of the book,
corresponding to each chapter ,encourages the reader to read other
works.
Anyone who has read "Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn, which is a novel that
focuses on the causes and consequences of modern civilization, should
read "Guns Germs and Steel"
AWR 96 @aol.com - (Larry Rosenfeld) from Highland, Park, New Jersey
08904 (USA) , 09/28/97, rating=3D10:
Excellent telescopic view of human history=20
In his attempt to explain why Europeans became dominant, Diamond asks
and answers many questions along the way. He is very specific regarding
comparative geography, climate, availability of domesticable plants and
animals. Sometimes, in his willingness to address all questions Diamond
is forced to speculate. Even then, he is logical and provides as much
fact as he can to support his hypotheses. In attempting to debunk racist
theories, he demonstrates how Polynesian societies became diverse
because of diverse environmental factors despite physical commonalities.
There were hunter gatherers and agricultural societies, conquerors and
conquered. The book is scholarly, well structured, very enjoyable and
readable. It progresses in such a way as to provoke questions and then
goes on to answer each one. A well developed reading list at the end of
the book, corresponding to each chapter ,encourages the reader to read
other works. Anyone who has read "Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn, which is a
novel that focuses on the causes and consequences of modern
civilization, should read "Guns Germs and Steel"
[log in to unmask] from Novato, CA, 08/27/97, rating
an ambitious survey of the evolution of civilization
In contrast to the reviewer who characterized this book as "marred by
cant", I found very little in the way of political axgrinding in this
work. Other than a reference to the "Bell Curve" genre of studies which
seek to expose an ethographic causation for intelligence distribution, I
found Diamond judicious and discreet in avoiding political or rhetorical
cheerleading. His survey of the growth of human societies was informed
and fascinating. I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in
comparative culture or natural science.
[log in to unmask], 07/08/97, rating
Wonderful scholarship and writing marred by can
July 8, 1997 Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond At least I bought
the book from AMAZON ! I give it a well-deserved 5/10. The 5 is for the
excellent writing and the breathtaking scholarship. I give Jared Diamond
a U for analysis and idealogical cant . Starting from a promising and
evocative premise Mr. Diamond ends with a load of scholarly fudge so
tainted by current fashionable thinking that his great enterprise is
very much diminished. "How is it that you white people have developed
all this cargo and brought it to New Guinea and we black people have no
cargo ?" The question is seminal. You have more than enough for
yourselves and can bring it here and almost give it away; and we have
none. Good cheap fish hooks; transistor radios, with batteries; small re
liable electric generators; outboard motors that can pull against the
fastest-rushing river currets; beautiful rifles that can bring down game
at 300 meters; satellite television; --- cargo, cargo, cargo. Diamond
doesn't see the poignancy of the question, he's too busy trying to show
his humanity, political correctness and he is on his knees begging for
forgiveness from our very insightful Yali. In this case at least, I
agree with the author, this New Guinean has more intelligence than at
least one Western academic. Pizzaro was a bad boy. Pestilential vectors
operating through close living with animals gave immunity to infection.
Colonial loathsomeness. What has this got to do with cargo ? Yali knows
the truth: some civilizations are indeed better than others. Some are
indeed more humane and more productive and allow more freedom for human
development than others and only an intellectual caught in the web of
his own nitpicking could believe otherwise. I do not doubt the innate
intelligence of people everywhere, but tick-tack-ticking on a keyboard
by a computer operator is several orders of magnitude from the accretion
of science and multi-layered technologies that brought Western
civilization from Euclid and Archimedes to a 4-million device computer
chip. But, but, you say, old Ed Wilson says its a good book. The great
Paul Ehrlich the grandaddy of population studies, writes an approving
note. As the old adage has it "I'll write a blurb for your book but
please don't make me read it." Look, I don't want be mean about this but
it seems the only way we can reform this kind of wrongheadedness is by
refusing to participate. Take your mate to the driving range and shoot a
pail of balls. Have dinner out at MacDonalds on me. Save your money in
an S&P Index based fund (currently paying 29%). This book was a shrewdly
designed marketing plan by WWNorton: with the proliferation of
multicultural courses in America's universities, there's almost a
built-in sale of about 20,000 books and that will pay for the costs of
production and then some. The rest is gravey.
[log in to unmask], 06/25/97, rating
A Triple, But Not a Home Run
I love this sort of book, and it is relatively well written. See the
other comments for what's good . . . here's what could be improved.
State the conclusion early on. We have an idea where the author is
headed, so there's no need to try to pull us into the book to see what
the mystery is all about. Just state simply and succinctly what the
conclusion is and a brief list of the primary supporting data. Then let
us judge whether the book supports these.
Don't be so repetitive -- especially toward the last five chapters.
Don't gloss over inconsistent data that is not supportive of the theory.
For instance, it isn't enough to simply write off the Alps and
Carpathian Mtns as insignificant obstacles to the migration of animals,
foods and ideas. At least tell us why (easily navigated passes,
alternate routes, etc.)
Finally, raise and answer (or dispose of) the obvious questions that
follow upon your premise: e.g., did the geographic differences and
diversity of flora and fauna effect the evolution of the peoples as well
as their history?
All of the above said, I do recommend the book.
Greg Hullender ([log in to unmask]), 06/05/97, rating
Winning through Diversity
Why did Western Civilization defeat its competitors? The short answer,
according to Guns, Germs and Steel, is that it had the benefit of
greater diversity, and that this diversity was the gift of geography.
More kinds of domesticated plants and more kinds of domesticated large
animals were available across Eurasia. More kinds of food meant more
people, thus more kinds of diseases (which other peoples weren't immune
to) and also more new ideas. Diamond does a great job developing this
concept and exploring the implications. Definitely a must read.
[log in to unmask], 06/04/97, rating:
Answered questions I've wondered about for years
I ordered this book from one of my book clubs, hoping it might be good.
By the time I was halfway through it, I was raving about it so much that
my local library had ordered a copy sight unseen, a friend almost took
it away from me before I could finish it, and god only knows how many
people he will pass it on to. I may never see it again. It had never
occured to me that some continents have a plethora of domesticatible
animals and plants and some simply don't. This is a complex book and
would take pages and pages to review properly. Suffice it to say that I
read 10 to 20 books a week and haven't been caught by a book like this
in years. DON'T MISS THIS ONE!!
[log in to unmask], 05/14/97, rating:
A fascinating history of the world
I thought this was a simply amazing book. Diamond's singular talent is
to bring knowledge from a disparate array of natural and social sciences
into a meaningful, coherent whole. Diamond examines the world and its
peoples throught the lenses of linguistics, geography, botany, zoology,
sociology, and epidemiology and somehow combines them all to create a
theory of human history. This book addresses many fascinating questions
most of us have probably never really thought about, but which can
explain a lot about history. How come when Europeans, mounted on
horseback, colonized Africa, they weren't met by Arficans mounted on
Zebras and Rhinos? How come Europeans decimated indegenous Americans
with their diseases, instead of vice versa? Diamond marshalls compelling
evidence to show that a populations' intitial advantages in terms of
readily domesticatible plants and animals, more than anything else,
explains the ultimate fates of human societies. In terms of sheer
knowledge, I learned more from this book than any I have ever read.
>From Kirkus Reviews, 01/15/97:
MacArthur fellow and UCLA evolutionary biologist Diamond (The Third
Chimpanzee, 1992, etc.) takes as his theme no less than the rise of
human civilizations. On the whole this is an impressive achievement,
with nods to the historians, anthropologists, and others who have laid
the groundwork. Diamond tells us that the impetus for the book came from
a native New Guinea friend, Yali, who asked him, ``Why is it that you
white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but
we black people had little cargo of our own?'' The long and short of it,
says Diamond, is biogeography. It just so happened that 13,000 years
ago, with the ending of the last Ice Age, there was an area of the world
better endowed with the flora and fauna that would lead to the take-off
toward civilization: that valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers we
now call the Fertile Crescent. There were found the wild stocks that
became domesticated crops of wheat and barley. Flax was available for
the development of cloth. There was an abundance of large mammals that
could be domesticated: sheep, goats, cattle. Once agriculture is born
and animals domesticated, a kind of positive feedback drives the growth
toward civilization. People settle down; food surpluses can be stored so
population grows. And with it comes a division of labor, the rise of an
elite class, the codification of rules, and language. It happened, too,
in China, and later in Mesoamerica. But the New World was not nearly as
abundant in the good stuff. And like Africa, it is oriented North and
South, resulting in different climates, which make the diffusion of
agriculture and animals problematic. While you have heard many of these
arguments before, Diamond has brought them together convincingly. The
prose is not brilliant and there are apologies and redundancies that we
could do without. But a fair answer to Yali's question this surely is,
and gratifyingly, it makes clear that race has nothing to do with who
does or does not develop cargo. (Book- of-the-Month Club/History Book
Club/Quality Paperback Book Club selection) -- Copyright =A91997, Kirkus
Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Table of Contents
Prologue: Yali's Question: The regionally differing courses of history
Ch. 1. Up to the Starting Line: What happened on all the continents
before 11,000 B.C.?
Ch. 2. A Natural Experiment of History: How geography molded societies
on Polynesian islands
Ch. 3. Collision at Cajamarca: Why the Inca emperor Atahuallpa did not
capture King Charles I of Spain
Ch. 4. Farmer Power: The roots of guns, germs, and steel
Ch. 5. History's Haves and Have-Nots: Geographic differences in the
onset of food production
Ch. 6. To Farm or Not to Farm: Causes of the spread of food production
Ch. 7. How to Make an Almond: The unconscious development of ancient
crops
Ch. 8. Apples or Indians: Why did peoples of some regions fail to
domesticate plants?
Ch. 9. Zebras, Unhappy Marriages, and the Anna Karenina Principle: Why
were most big wild mammal species never domesticated?
Ch. 10. Spacious Skies and Tilted Axes: Why did food production spread
at different rates on different continents?
Ch. 11. Lethal Gift of Livestock: The evolution of germs
Ch. 12. Blueprints and Borrowed Letters: The evolution of writing
Ch. 13. Necessity's Mother: The evolution of technology
Ch. 14. From Egalitarianism to Kleptocracy: The evolution of government
and religion
Ch. 15. Yali's People: The histories of Australia and New Guinea
Ch. 16. How China became Chinese: The history of East Asia
Ch. 17. Speedboat to Polynesia: The history of the Austronesian
expansion
Ch. 18. Hemispheres Colliding: The histories of Eurasia and the Americas
compared
Ch. 19. How Africa became Black: The history of Africa
Epilogue: The Future of Human History as a Science
Acknowledgments
Further Readings
Credits
Index
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