About this title: This book answers the most obvious, the most important, yet the most difficult question about human history: why history unfolded so differently on different continents. Geography and biography, not race, moulded the contrasting fates of Europeans, Asians, Native Americans, sub-Saharan Africans, and aboriginal Australians. An ambitious synthesis of history, biology, ecology and linguistics, Guns, Germs and Steel is one of the most important and humane works of popular science.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Trade Paperback
Publisher: Vintage Books, United Kingdom
Date Published: 1998
ISBN-13:9780099302780ISBN:0099302780
Description: Good. 8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" tall. 480 pages, clean text. Cover is worn with rubbing, creasing. Few tiny stains on the outer pages edges. read more
Edition: Reprint
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Vintage, London
Date Published: 1998
ISBN-13:9780099302780ISBN:0099302780
Description: Octavo Size. Very Good condition. Illustrated with Black and White Photographs.480 pages Winner of the 1998 Rhone-Poulenc Science Book Prize. read more
Edition: NEW ED
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: VINTAGE Country = UNITED KINGDOM
Date Published: 1998
ISBN-13:9780099302780ISBN:0099302780
Description: BRAND NEW PAPERBACK. 480 pages. (480 pages) this work abandons the conventional distinctions between history and science. diamond focuses on what ancient people were endowed with in the way of land, animals and plants, and on the confrontations between less and more advanced people to see how this led to today's inequalities. 32 b&w halftones edition new ed (Paperback) read more
Description: New. DISPATCHED FROM UNITED KINGDOM. NO EXPEDITED SHIPPING! Please note orders are confirmed immediately and may take 2-3 business days to ship. This processing time is in addition to the shipping time. Please allow 10-14 days for delivery. Brand new item. Order now. Selling online since 1995. Order with confidence. Code: G20091201051929D. read more
Description: Like New. SHIPS FROM GERMANY. NO EXPEDITED SHIPPING! Allow 10-14 business days for delivery. Please always check the language in the product description section. Few left in stock-order soon. Selling online since 1995. Code: L20091201085023I. read more
Description: New. PLEASE NOTE: All books are promptly imported from the UK using DHL or Royal Mail international mail WITH TRACKING NUMBER. D elivery is typically 5-10 working days. Please do not select expedited shipping. Professional and reliable bookseller (est.1987). read more
Edition: NEW ED
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Vintage/Ebury (A Division of Random House Group), UK
ISBN-13:9780099302780ISBN:0099302780
Description: New. Please note that deliveries to addresses in the UK and Europe will be in 4-14 business days. Other countries should refer to Alibris standard times. This book answers the most obvious, the most important, yet the most difficult question about human history: why history unfolded so differently on different continents. Geography and biography, not race, moulded the contrasting fates of Europeans, Asians, Native Americans, sub-Saharan Africans, and aboriginal Australians. An ambitious ... read more
Edition: NEW ED
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Vintage/Ebury (A Division of Random House Group), UK
ISBN-13:9780099302780ISBN:0099302780
Description: New. This book answers the most obvious, the most important, yet the most difficult question about human history: why history unfolded so differently on different continents. Geography and biography, not race, moulded the contrasting fates of Europeans, Asians, Native Americans, sub-Saharan Africans, and aboriginal Australians. An ambitious synthesis of history, biology, ecology and linguistics, Guns, Germs and Steel is one of the most important and humane works of popular science. ISBN10: ... read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Vintage,, London:
Date Published: 1998.
ISBN-13:9780099302780ISBN:0099302780
Description: Octavo, paperback, 480 pp., black and white photographs, maps. BRAND NEW. This is an ambitious synthesis of history, biology, ecology and linguistics. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Vintage, London
Date Published: 1998
ISBN-13:9780099302780ISBN:0099302780
Description: New. 480p.,[32]p. of plates : ill., maps ; 20 cm. Includes: illustrations, maps. Originally published: London : Jonathan Cape, 1997. Includes bibliographical references and index. read more
Edition: NEW ED
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Vintage/Ebury (A Division of Random House Group), UK
ISBN-13:9780099302780ISBN:0099302780
Description: New. PLEASE NOTE that we do not offer expedited shipping. Orders placed with the priority shipping option will automatically be canceled. This book answers the most obvious, the most important, yet the most difficult question about human history: why history unfolded so differently on different continents. Geography and biography, not race, moulded the contrasting fates of Europeans, Asians, Native Americans, sub-Saharan Africans, and aboriginal Australians. An ambitious synthesis of history, ... read more
Description: New. PLEASE NOTE: All books are promptly shipped from our UK warehouse using Royal Mail or DHL. International Priority mail for non-UK deliveries. Delivery is typically 2-4 working days for UK delivery. Heavier or more expensive books are shipped with a TRACKING NUMBER. Professional and reliable bookseller (est.1987). read more
"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 an innate superiority by Caucasians. He provides a stunning analysis of why civilization emerged in the places in which it did. He tells us of the few areas on the planet suitable for the emergence of farming, and why such farming flourished in some areas more than in others. He talks about the importance of domesticated animals, and shows how it was possible for them to have been domesticated in some, but not all of the theoretically possible locations. He discusses the impact of germs, the immunity defense developed by more urban dwellers, and the offense those germs serve when those urban dwellers come into contact with peoples who lack such immunities. Although Steel figures prominently in the title, this aspect is given the lightest treatment in the book. Diamond closes with a plea for history to be redefined as History Science, claiming that, as with many other "historical" sciences, it holds the elements necessary to marit the "science" designation."
"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, technology). "Why is it," he asked, "that you Europeans have so much more cargo than we do?" Diamond thought he had come up with a good question, and wrote the book in an attempt to answer it.
The core of Diamond's explanation is that Europeans were essentially lucky in two respects. First, we have unusually many easily domesticable plant and animal species. Second, since Europe is oriented East-West rather than North-South, a species which is domesticated in one part of Europe has a good chance of thriving in another, so there are many opportunities to swap farming technology between different areas. It helps that there is an easily navigable river system, and also that there are no impassible deserts or mountain ranges. These conditions are not reproduced in most other parts of the world; Diamond has a range of interesting tables, showing how few useful domesticable species there are elsewhere. Because we got efficient farming earlier than most other people, we also got cities and advanced technology earlier, and everything else followed from that initial lead we established.
One objection you could make is that it wasn't luck, but rather that Europeans were more enterprising than people in other areas about finding good species to domesticate. Diamond's answer to this is fairly convincing. Having lived extensively with pre-industrial people, he says that we city-dwellers just don't understand how well they know their flora and fauna, and how active their interest in them is. I guess a New Guinea tribesman would, conversely, be surprised at how quickly word gets around on the Internet when a cool new website appears. Basically, what he's saying is that pre-industrial people tried everything that could be tried, and when they didn't find anything good, it's because it wasn't there. Systematic studies by modern scientists do seem to support this conclusion.
Another criticism some readers have leveled at Diamond is that he makes history completely deterministic - once the geography was fixed, everything that happened after that was inevitable. I don't actually think that's fair. Diamond is open about the fact that his theories make one embarrassingly incorrect prediction: if it was all about being first to domesticate plant and animal species and set up efficient farming, then China should be the world's preeminent civilization. Even though he makes some attempt to explain why this isn't so, there does right now seem to be a fair case for saying that it's not only geography.
Luckily, George W. Bush has been working hard to try and smooth things out. If the Western world can just arrange two or three more leaders like him, all of Diamond's data will hopefully come out the way it's supposed to, and the last few hundred years of Western history can be written off as a statistical blip. Way to go, Dubya!"
"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?"
No, I counter. It just removes the douche-y social Darwinist parts. Plus, if he weren't trying to prove an overarching point about the entirety of human history, readers wouldn't be subjected to his style of argument, which largely consists of applying only certain parts of his thesis at certain points (see his arguments regarding the lengths of human habitation of North American versus how those same arguments are applied regarding Africa), waving away pieces of evidence that would call his thesis into question, and neglecting to include any citations, instead relying on a "Further Reading" section. Removing all of this would leave the only parts really worth reading: the stuff about plant and animal domestication. Which was awesome."
"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 that.
This was one of those awesome books that blew my mind in almost every chapter with some fact or analysis that threw something I knew or thought I knew about the world into a totally different light or explained how something got the way it was. (For example, my nerdy self loved the description of how people go about starting to domesticate plants, why we have domesticated almonds but not acorns, stuff like that.)
Diamond uses a mixture of ecological history, linguistics, and archeology to make a pretty concise and well-supported argument that a few things-suitable domesticable plants, suitable domesticable animals, east-west vs north-south axis, and size-led to the large differences in development of technology, epidemic diseases, writing, and political organization that allowed, for example, Europe to conquer the Americas. It's a fascinating tale that everyone should know.
I especially appreciate the perspective that comes from his choice to focus in detail on what happens when cultures collide in areas outside the Europe-Americas story. The story of the South Chinese expanding into the Indonesian archipelago and Polynesia, for example, allows this American reader to not only become a much better-educated world citizen, but to think about the issues in a less familiar context where I have fewer knee-jerk associations.
While Diamond bends over backward, and rightly so, to make clear that there's not only nothing inherent in different people's genes that led them to develop "civilization" at different speeds, he also tries to be clear early on that there's nothing inherently wonderful about civilization either. I know from another paper of his that hunter-gatherers actually enjoyed better physical health than settled farmers. (He does slip from this from time to time, though, and starts talking as if it's too bad not to invent any given thing there is to invent.)
But still, his account leads right to, yet doesn't address at all, some hard questions: Was/is it inevitable that those who did accidentally acquire food production and its advantages address the population pressures that arise from food production by overrunning and massacring in cold-blood other societies? (It is sobering and instructive to remember how much of that had already happened long before 1492.)
Should we care about the extermination of human populations and their languages? (It seems that the early human-caused mass extinctions of large mammals had *huge* effects on continental competitiveness: might loss of human cultural diversity do the same?)
Or, perhaps more relevant to today's world: recognizing that the advantages held by the global North were not "earned" or "deserved," is there justification for us to continue wielding our economic power to maintain that disparity rather than letting/helping other areas either "catch up" or remain at the complexity level appropriate to their environment?
Although Diamond's neutral political/moral stance irritated me at times (mostly when it bordered on "it's inevitable that human societies are self-centered warmongers"), I think it was the right choice for the book--those are important questions, but ones that his analysis should contribute to, not vice versa. He even offers a bit of a look at an answer when he starts, tentatively, to explore why Europe went a conquerin' overseas and China, which alone by his measures could also have done so, didn't (yet)."
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