If he could only teach just one history course in each college....

books:


	• Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies Jared M. Diamond W. W. Norton & Company, 1999 - 480 pages average customer review:based on 1048 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Geography, not genetics

A lot of reviewers have gone into detail about author Jared Diamond's arguments in Guns, Germs and Steel, so I won't repeat them. Essentially, he says that geography was a major factor, although not the only factor, in determining why some societies are more advanced than others. He also says that cultural and individual factors played a role in the success or failure of individual societies.

Overall, GGS is easy to read and understand. It can get a little boring and does go into too much detail on occasions but mostly it is an engrossing book. Diamond starts many of the chapters with a set of questions, gives some background, and then answers those questions. Even if you're not very knowledgeable when it comes to this subject area the format makes it for the most part understandable.

Some negative reviewers complain that Diamond is anti-European/anti-white and is simply making excuses for less successful societies. But this isn't true. It is not just Europeans who have conquered and displaced others peoples. Diamond goes into a lot of detail about Bantu farmers transplanting other groups in Africa and Chinese domination of Asia.

What Diamond does do is put to rest the idea of genetic superiority. He goes into detail about various groups, such as Polynesians, that were separated into different environments. He explains how those groups, even though the same genetically, fared very differently based on the environments of the islands they settled.

He also explains that even though some peoples are primitive by our standards they are not unintelligent, which is something many people in advanced societies believe. However, Diamond does support the idea of cultural superiority to some extent. He says that conservative cultures that are not open to innovation either gets transplanted or taken over by those that are open to innovation.

This book is really a macro look at the development of human societies. For example, the book's goal is not to explain why European peoples (including Americans) currently dominate the world instead of the Chinese (although some reasons are given). Rather, the goal is to explain why Eurasians had the potential to dominate but peoples like Native Americans and Australian Aborigines didn't.

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If he could only teach just one history course in each college....

..it wouldn't be "one damn fact after the other," a comment on the study of history that Diamond references. His historical book is the antithesis of the "big man" version of history, so-and-so meets X, and says this and that, and decides Y. His is a study of history in its broadest swaths, examining the proximate reasons for a given outcome, but always striving to ground his work in the ultimate causations.

One of the numerous strengths of this book is Diamond's multidisciplinary command of the increasingly fragmented fields of human knowledge. He can readily draw on linguistic theories, archeology, paleontology, literature, agriculture, etc. I found his brief explanation of Carbon-14 dating lucid, with the important emphasis on the recently discovered variability in this isotope in the earth's atmosphere over the last 50,000 years. He draws on his long anthropological experience in New Guinea to buttress his central premises, and I personally found his account of the human expansion into South East Asia, Australia and Polynesia most illuminating. Another high point was his description of the Spanish defeat of the Incas at Cajamarca in 1532.

He provides very plausible answers to seemingly difficult questions as to how 168 Spaniards could defeat 80,000 Incas, as well as the central question of the book, "Yali's question," why the "whites" had most of the "cargo," and the New Guineans so little. His thesis is that the environment and geography are the paramount determinants, and it was where particular mammals could be domesticated, and certain grains could be cultivated that determined where "civilizations" would eventually arise. With a class of individuals not devoted to acquiring food full-time, they had the time to develop technological improvements to the human condition. In addition, an incidental condition occurred due to man's proximity to domesticated animals - diseases, which certain individuals developed immunity to, and which decimated populations not previously exposed, as in the Americas. He does not totally dismiss that quirky "human factor" of a few great and not so great men, and specifically speculates how the world might have been different if Hitler had been killed in the 1944 assassination attempt, or even earlier, in a 1930 car accident.

Aside from the numerous thought-provoking aspects of the book itself, I found myself reading many of the 93 1-star reviews of this book posted at Amazon (out of at 1048 as of this writing). How could this many people strongly dislike the book? (By way of comparison, another best seller, Ayaan Hirsi Ali's "Infidel" has only 3 1-star reviews out of 216). Many simply denounced the book for being "politically correct," meaning that he provided a non-racist answer for why some societies are more technologically advanced than others (but not necessarily happier!). Others fell asleep (!) reading this enthralling account of humankind's development, but I really could find no one who indicated factual errors (some were claimed, but I wondered if they had actually read the book, because they made assertions that Diamond did not.) I too looked for assertions I would contest, and felt his statement that the wheel would not have helped the people of Mesoamerica without domesticated animals to be incorrect (for anyone who has ever used a wheel barrel), but later in the book, Diamond also raises this point.

Overall, a superlative book, and a start towards making the study of history a science.

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Panorama of History....................

Jared Diamond has written a comprehensive readable book describing some of the prominent reasons that societies have failed in the past and often succumbed to invaders. It seemed well written to me and although I thought the title a little pretensious, the subject matter is good.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize. In this "artful, informative, and delightful" (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. Societies that had had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed religion --as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war --and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, the Rhone-Poulenc Prize, and the Commonwealth club of California's Gold Medal.

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