Guns, Germs and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years - Softcover

Diamond, Jared

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099302780 ISBN 13: 9780099302780

Publisher: Vintage, 1998

Synopsis

WITH A NEW AFTERWORD FROM THE AUTHOR

Why has human history unfolded so differently across the globe?

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Jared Diamond puts the case that geography and biogeography, 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 remains a ground-breaking and humane work of popular science.

'A book of big questions, and big answers' Yuval Noah Harari, bestselling author of Sapiens

About this title

Review:

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 certainly not 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 bias, Guns, Germs, and Steel is good global history.

Review:

"The most absorbing account on offer of the emergence of a world divided between have and have-nots... Never before put together so coherently, with such a combination of expertise, charm and compassion" (The Times)

"A book of remarkable scope... One of the most important and readable works on the human past" (Nature)

"A prodigious, convincing work, conceived on a grand scale" (Observer)

"This is the book that turned me from a historian of medieval warfare into a student of humankind" (Yuval Noah Harari Week)

"Fascinating, coherent, compassionate and completely accessible" (Sunday Telegraph)

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0099302780
• ISBN 13: 9780099302780
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 592