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Summary: Not What I Expected
Review: Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond is an attempt to explain why it was that Europeans came to conquer the world and not some other people. However, the book really doesn't deliver on that front. It is more of an explanation why Eurasian socities became dominate over non-Eurasian societies.Diamond really doesn't say anything extremely new with this book. He promotes the geographic theory of societal development to explain the more advanced Eurasian technology. Those geographic factors being better animal and plant domesticates, better weather, and less barriers to trade. These are not new theories. I was expecting more discussion of the really intriguing question of why didn't China colonize the world instead of Europe. Diamond doesn't begin to discuss this until the *epilogue* and then only in several pages where he discusses the cultural and geographical aspects of European assendency. The final part of the book is much more interesting than the first three. It is in this fourth section that Diamond discusses the clashes that have occurred between differing societies. But even this is done with more of a descriptive than explanatory voice. Guns, Germs, and Steel is more for the uninitiated in the study of human societal development. This book is a building block for more complex ideas.
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Summary: Extremely educational, if slightly incomplete.
Review: This was one of the most educational books I have read in years. Diamond analyzes several key elements affecting the development of societies, from the axis of the continent to the availability of plants that can be domesticated, and makes it all very interesting. One of the best-researched books on the topic, Diamond still doesn't pretend to have all the answers. Unfortunately, Diamond excessively downplays the role of culture and religeon influencing a society's development in the pursuit of avoiding offending anyone. The explanation of why the Fertile Crescent and China lost technological leads over Europe, a topic that should have been a key component of this book, is treated rather briefly in the final chapter with somewhat cursory analysis. Nevertheless, this book is highly recommended, particularly for laymen on the subject like myself.
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Summary: informative, but repetitive
Review: I found this book to be very interesting and a good read, and made me think about certain things in new and different ways. Unfortunately, Diamond has a tendency to repeat himself from chapter to chapter, so that something he talked about in depth two chapters before he finds the need to mention again in the current chapter. I have also read "The Third Chimpanzee," and overall I found that to be a better read. Having read "Guns" before, though, I was able to follow the arguments in "Chimpanzee" a bit more easily, since he made references to people and places there that he did not elaborate on. Overall I find him to be a very interesting writer and for anyone interested in human evolution and history I would certainly recommend his books as an introduction.
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Summary: A wonderful counter-factual
Review: Could Europe have been conquered by Bantu warriors mounted on domesticated zebras? Why could this have not happened? Well, says Jared Diamond, the geographical factor of the Sahara desert for one thing. Also, the zebra because of its short temper, is not domesticable. The nature of African geography led Bantu expansion to the more clement weather of the South. This is one of the fascinating counter-factuals that Diamond uses to illustrate his case for geographic and biologcal determinism in human history. The Fertile Crescent and the Southern Steppes of Russia providentially had most of the plants and animals most easily domisticated - wheat for example is the best cereal and the horse is the most useful for warfare. Strangely, Diamond does not draw attention to the obvious factor of the Mediterranean as a highway for commerce and ideas, but he does show that at the beginning of the modern era, Europe was best positioned to conquer the other continents for demographic, geographic and general biological reasons, not for reasons of racial superiority.
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Summary: History As Science
Review: Guns, Germs, And Steel Jared Diamond History As Science If the Aborigines had originally inhabited Europe, and Caucasian Europeans had started their civilization in Australia would anything be different? Your average racist would say that Australia would have developed a great civilization while Europe would have remained a region of the world where people today would still be throwing spears about. Mr. Diamond explores the progress of humanity by scientifically studying the factors that permitted and encouraged the growth of complex societies. A society is where it is because of geographical factors, and not because of any variables of intelligence or physique. What are these factors? The answers are fascinating: Societies moved from hunter/gatherer types to farmers because they lived in areas where potential food crops grew, and where animals capable of being domesticated lived. Most of the world's food crops originated in the Fertile Crescent of the Mediterranean. Many areas of the world such as Australia and much of the United States had no original food crops. Could it be that some people were just too stupid to recognize a plant's potential? No. Amazingly almost all edible plants were domesticated thousands of years ago, as were our domesticated animals. Australia had no animals capable of being domesticated while horses, sheep, goats, and pigs originated in, and spread quickly through the Euro-Asian continent. We learn some interesting facts about food plant development. Many plants became food because of defective genes. The wild almond tree is poisonous, but some trees were found with defective cyanide producing genes. They were cultivated. Wild peas have a gene that causes the pea pod to explode when ripe, which would make harvesting impossible. Pea plants were found that lacked this "explosion" gene, and so today we eat peas. Societies with domestic animals developed diseases that originated in these animals. (Measles, tuberculosis, and smallpox come from cattle; influenza from pigs). Thus Europeans decimated the Incas and Native Americans by passing on these germs. Incas and Native Americans had no domesticated animals (only the llama in Peru), so they could not fight back with germs of their own. Mr. Diamond presents an immense amount of evidence to show that all peoples are intelligent, and that the development of large, organized societies hinges entirely on varied local natural resources, and being in locations where natural barriers (deserts, mountains, oceans) did not preclude the sharing of resources with others. This is a most impressive work that provides the reader with insight into why hunter/gatherer tribes live together on the same planet with highly complex technological nations.
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Summary: Worth the time to read
Review: Overall a fine book; well worth reading. I learned more about the history of man from 500,000BC to 4000 BC in this book than in the rest of my life put together. The overwhelming global perspective this book makes it even more valuable. Truly a fine description of many of the core formative elements of society. The books bends over backward to avoid any taint of racism. However, Mr. Diamond oversteps his bounds when he claims that he has resolved all issues that deal with how racism arises. I wish that these issues were as easily resolved. The older deeper issues that arise before the foundation of human society still exist. And Mr. Diamond's smug self importance taints an otherwise fine book.
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Summary: The World Looks Different After Reading This Book
Review: This is one of 3 or 4 books I've read that profoundly changed the way I look at the world.
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Summary: An engrossing explanation of why Europe took over the world!
Review: Why did Europe conquer the New World so easily? Why didn't the older populations Africa dominate the world? Why did some civilizations advance quickly and some remained "primitive"? Why did the Europeans develop the printing press instead of the more civilized Chinese? This outstanding book answers the questions that nag us about why the world is the way it is. Diamond backs his opinions with clear data on why and when advances became available. This is a must-read book for anyone with any interest in anthropology and why things are the way we are.
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Summary: Political Correctness Run Amok
Review: Jared Diamond spent both the paperback preface and the intro to the hardback, spouting the politically correct dogma that he, as an historian and not a paleontologist, is enslaved to. He easily takes to flights of fancy on scant information that lead to the conclusion that primitive societies are actually more intelligent than developed Western societies. But whenever evidence is presented to the contrary, it is always regarded as racist, inaccurate, or placed into the context of "what indeed is intelligence" or the flaws of IQ tests. His paleontological data, especially on the origins of homo erectus migrations and the population of the Americas, is 10 years old and is selected from the politically correct blessed database, not from the scientific record. Of course he is but an historian and Historians exist to re-write history, so what else should we expect? On a micro level however, JD hits on some irrefutable aspects of human societal development. First the fact that a stronger society will seek to exterminate a lesser one, and the unpopular notion that man, exemplefied by the extermination of 29 species of anminal over 100 pound in weight in a period of 1000 years that coincided with the migration of mongoloid Indians into the Americas, has been the progeneitor of the majority of extinctions of animalia over the last 13,000 years.
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Summary: An interesting study, with many flaws
Review: Prof. Diamond has produced a fluently-written account of a popular theory -- that contemporary differences in human cultures and societies are the result solely of starting conditions with respect to geography and environment. However, the book holds numerous flaws. There can be no doubt that Prof. Diamond is the master of a vast amount of data, biological and historical, and he marshals those data to good effect in support of his theories. However, there are many troubling omissions and contradictions contained in the book, which indicate that either there are important holes in Prof. Diamond's knowledge, or that he has been somewhat too selective in his use of data. For example, in discussing the native cereals available to various local groups for purposes of cultivation, he consistently speaks as if corn were the only grain available in Mesoamerica for domestication, and, indeed, that it was the only grain so domesticated. In fact, amaranth was also available, and domesticated. It further lacks many of the deficiencies which Diamond asserts made corn an imperfect domesticate. His failure to deal with this contradictory fact calls his more general arguments into question. Diamond also ignores facts which are uncomfortable or unexplainable under the terms of his theory. For example, he points out that certain grasses native to the Eastern U.S. produce "dream" grains -- the example he offers is sumpweed. Yet the reason he offers that it was not domesticated is weak; it causes hay-fever, and has an objectionable smell. As Diamond should be aware, the question of whether a smell is objectionable is often culturally determined, as are many aesthetic notions. So the fact that we may find it objectionable now does not mean that contemporary consumers of it did, and does not explain why they failed fully to domesticate it. He also offers that other grains had seeds that were too small; but at the same time offers the example of corn being engineered over many years from teosinte, which had even more drawbacks. Why could these plants not have been bred for larger seeds, over time? Why did mesoamericans engineer corn in this way, while north-eastern inhabitants failed to do the same with the plants available to them? He argues that the fact that eastern US farmers abandoned their own crops when offered mesoamerican replacements indicates they were less worthwhile; but all that proves is that the mesoamericans had done a better job of engineering their crops for human consumption, not that those crops were better. Diamond also fails to provide an answer to the question of why mesoamericans failed to adopt the wheel. While arguing that the lack of large draft animals made their use unlikely, he acknowledges that the wheel was, in fact, first used as an adjunct to human labor, in the form of wheelbarrows. The reader is left to wonder why mesoamericans failed to adopt this practical use for the wheel, while leaving them on toys. The book is irksome in its continual reliance on loose arguments, consistently indicated by the use of such terms as "surely", "clearly" or "it must therefore follow," etc. Those words indicate a weakness of proof, not clarity of proof, and encourage the reader to disagree with his conclusions. The book needs a good edit. Finally, Prof. Diamond proves too little. It is unsurprising, and probably not subject to serious debate, that the earlier occupation of the old world by humans means those societies would have a head start over societies arising on a continent populated only tens of thousands of years later. Furthermore, it is intuitively acceptable that isolated societies (such as his precious New Guinea) are less likely to innovate, based on a lack of intellectual cross-currents and the inability to take advantage of new discoveries. But his book cannot explain the peculiar phenomenon of the rise of the West. His geographical and environmental advantages are spread over the whole Eurasian continent, from Spain to China, and are centered in the Fertile Crescent, and these areas have indubitably been linked by trade and war for millenia. Why, then, was America not colonized by Chinese explorers? Why was China invaded by Europeans during the eighteenth centuries and forward, and not the reverse. The fertile crescent was indeed the center of civilization for many years, while Europe was a back-water suffering invasion until the mid-seventeenth century. Why was that trend reversed so suddenly and dramatically, so that by the nineteenth century Britain, France and Russia could vie for protectorates from Palestine east to Indochina? The answer, I would argue, is that the Industrial Revolution occurred in Europe -- indeed it began at the very time that China, the giant in terms of industrial production at the time, was turning in on itself. Why, then, did the IR, which is what made possible the enormous European expansion of the 18-19 centuries, occur in Europe and not China, Safavid Persia or the Ottoman Empire? That is the key question which Diamond's book leaves unanswered, and which, I believe, cannot be answered based on geography and climate alone. Better technological innovation is said to be a product of larger population sizes and densities; thus Eurasia's population is compared with Australia's to in support of that theory. But why did densely populated China fall behind in technological innovation versus the less crowded, less populated countries of Europe from about 1500 on? So, while this is an interesting book, full of valuable tid-bits of information, it fails because the facts offered to support the theories are inconsistent and incomplete and because it ultmately fails to do what its author set out to do -- explain the rise to predominance of one set of cultures or civilizations over all others. Ultimately, it appears more as an opportunity for Prof. Diamond to show off his extensive knowledge than the marshalling of that knowledge in service of a larger argument
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