Rating: 
Summary: Nice Try; Won't Fly.
Review: Diamond ostensibly wrote this book to refute the idea that ethnic groups naturally differ in average intelligence. That makes him very popular and gets him glowing reviews and moral applause. Unfortunately, there's nothing worse for a cause than arguments that don't fly. For starters, the evil heretics, the hereditarians, (even the notorious Philippe Rushton) don't claim that Europeans have the highest average IQs. They claim that Chinese, Japanese and Jews do. Whites are in the mediocre middle, actually. So, if the critics were logical, they would accuse these "despicable racists" of being Asian Supremacists, or Jewish Supremacists, not White Supremacists. And then no heroic exertions attempting to explain away the triumph of the WEST would be necessary. Indeed, Diamond is only helping the heretics to explain why, despite their higher natural intelligence, the East Asians didn't beat us to it. The "racist" hereditarians can now help themselves to the explanation Diamond so kindly offers. As for refuting the growing mountain of evidence supporting an IQ test score heritability of .70, nothing Diamond says has a prayer of disputing the likes of MZ-apart and adoption studies, so nothing he blathers on about climate has the power to offer any positive threat to "racist" hereditarianism.
Rating: 
Summary: In depth explainations of the patterns of human societies
Review: This book is excellent. The book deals with the broad patterns of human societies from expansion to death. It proves conclusively the ecological basis of human society. Patterns of human history are so well explained by ecological, biological, and geographical factors that any other sort of explaination pales in comparison. This is a must read for anyone interested in Island Biogeography and Human Ecology. Probably the reason why other reviewers are squemish about this book is they still want to believe humans are somehow unique rather than being highly social animals tied like all other creatures to our physical and biological environment. All other notions are either racist or nonsense, Jared Diamond is right.
Rating:
Summary: yeah, yeah, yeah...
Review: Outside of the tedious repetition and somewhat pedantic style of writing, my primary issues with this book are: 1) Almost flippant references to anthropology and anthropological theory. Diamond makes it sound as it cultural anthropology is a transparent and non-complicated discipline (one need not even be educated in anthropology to write a best-selling book on the subject.) This is a familiar - in my opinion - mistaken view of professionals in the "hard sciences." 2) I disagree with the views that Diamond articulates in the final chapter - that history should (let alone can) become a science, and that this will enable people to make a better future. My opinion is that to successfully challenge racism require a change in the terms of the debate - which may mean getting away from "scientific" thinking altogether.
Rating: 
Summary: Fascinating, Brilliant, Exhaustively Researched
Review: This work builds such a logical explanation for the author's theories regarding the origins of people and why we evolved differently in different places and at different rates of change. This book is not only a completely enjoyable read, but is a fascinating exploration into the origin and evolution of various cultures throughout the world. It has certainly given me pause to rethink alot of ideas that I held regarding the origins of race and culture. Highly recommended. I think classifying this in the young reader category is inaccurate, though a young person would undoubtably benefit from the ideas in this book, however I feel that this was not the audience that the writer was necessarily addressing.
Rating: 
Summary: All of the book could have been done in 50 pages
Review: Fascinating topic, unbelievably rambling writing style. Author does an OK job following his various lines of argument, to the point you believe him, but I was very bothered by two things in his writing (aside from the incessant rambling). The first was the absence of a recognition that chance must have played a big role in where we ended up ... but the author seems convinced that the reader needs a rational, pattern-based explanation for everything. That is tantamount to biological determinism. There couldn't be an explanation for EVERYTHING. The second "bother" is that the author never, never ever, has an alternative explanation for anything. It would help alot if we had an idea of what the realm of "scholarly debate" on some of these topics is. Yet the book is written as if nobody else ever investigated these issues, and came up with an equally compelling argument contrary to this author's. The author seems intellectually honest enough to recognize that there are other explanations for things, but he spends no time exploring those other explanations in his rush to come up with a believable explanation of his own. Alot of the foregoing could be forgiven if only the book was well written.
Rating:
Summary: Great Book, Minor Flaws, Responses to the Critics
Review: I concur with most of the favorable reviews. The subject and thesis are fascinating. The delivery is less than perfect. The fact that the thesis is also politically correct does not make it any less compelling. Addressing some of the unfavorable reviews below: Repetitive? Yes, but certain dynamics neccessarily repeat. Culture, Food production, language, writing and other technologies (and animal and plant species themselves) make their transfer from the peoples of one geographical location to those of another based on the same repeating factors: presence or absence of geographical and climatalogical barriers, density of population (i.e. "critical mass"), and finally whether the receiving culture is otherwise primed to receive. This point neccessarily has to be repeated throughout the book. Technology transfer across geographical boundries. The criticism here is that the author picks and chooses which technologies could have been expected to transfer. ("The easy ones transfer, the hard ones don't," implying that the Australians, for example were to stupid to make use of Indonesian tools, or the Sub-Saharan Africans to use writing.) I found no contradiction here. The individual nature of each advance in technology determines whether it will (a)likely transfer and (b)"stick" in a new location. The analysis is very neccessarily case by case, depending on need, availiblility of raw materials, climate, population density, and stage of prior cultural development. Can even the greatest salesman really sell refrigerators to Eskimos? -- or even to New Guineans, if they don't have electric plugs? The Mexican wheel. I too noted the contradiction here. The lack of a beast of burden does not render this technology any less valuable. Why didn't Aztec kids who played with toy wheels grow up to be Aztec adults who pushed wheelbarrows or pulled carts up ramps to build pyramids? Is it possible that Diamond has stretched too far in "discovering" an Aztec wheel in the pictures on Aztec pottery? I agree that the photos add nothing. Some intermediate junior editor pulled out his set of old National Geographics and threw in a few photos to make the book more salable.
Rating:
Summary: Good Book for the Average Person
Review: Overall, Mr. Diamond offers an interesting and compelling argument as to why different societies and cultures developped differently. His argument was clear, and the book made for easy reading. For people who have little knowledge of this subject and who, in light of recent attention to the matter (e.g. The Bell Curve, Origins of Race), want to learn more, this book would be a good starting place. My only reservation in recommending this book is that it is not a book for an advanced student. Having good basic knowledge of history and anthropology, I found much of the book to be too elementary and very repetitive. My mother, however, who had little knowledge of the subject, loved the book. My basic recommendation: if you don't know much about the development of human races and cultures, this book provides an easy-to-understand introduction to the subject. If, however, you are looking for a ground-breaking, paradigm-shifting scientific tract, this is probably not the book for you.
Rating:
Summary: The historical biogeography of the 'haves' and 'have-nots'
Review: 'Guns, germs, and steel' is a highly readable scholarly work by the distinguished author of 'The third chimpanzee.' It is also a very important book, one bound to generate (as it already has) considerable debate and more research. On the one hand, it deftly exposes pseudoscientific and racist arguments about how some people were able to conquer other people; on the other, it offers a cogent account, with plenty of evidence from different fields (linguistics, anthropology, genetics, botany, and zoology, among others), of how the world came to be what it is since the last glaciation (i.e., about 12,000 years ago). As Paul Ehrlich said, it's a 'whirlwind tour' of world history, but one worth taking.In this book, Diamond is primarily interested in ultimate, not proximate, causes. His main argument is simplicity itself: some people were at the right time and the right place to harness whatever nature gave them--and, as a consequence, were able to end up with several advantages over those people they eventually conquered. Evidently, the biogeography of plants and animals was different on every continent and played a crucial role in the development of human history; Eurasia, for example, had more plants and animals that could be domesticated just because its large size guaranteed large numbers to experiment with, whereas, say, Australia, due to its relative isolation and aridity, had almost nothing to offer to those who settled there. Eurasian people, therefore, were able to abandon their nomadic lifestyle early and settle in large groups that would allow them to develop the necessary guns, germs, and steel to conquer other people. Although the main argument of 'Guns, germs, and steel' is convincing, I found that towards the end the book becomes repetitive. The last chapter is particularly disappointing because, instead of elaborating his initial argument of how to treat history in more scientific terms, Diamond ends up saying things he already mentioned throughout the book, and adds nothing to what other people (e.g., Ernst Mayr) have said on the subject. That chapter could have rounded up the book very nicely; instead, it exposes the book to very serious criticism. I also question the many plates with pictures of representatives of different human 'races' because they really don't add anything to what the book is talking about (those plates would have been more appropriate in his previous book, 'The third chimpanzee'). Despite this, however, I highly recommend this otherwise excellent book to anyone interested in human history and to those keen on battling racist views.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant! But why didn't I think of that?
Review: Other reviewers thus far have been very eloquent in lauding "Guns, Germs, and Steel", and there is little I can add that has not been said before. Diamond has pulled off a rare feat--he has written a book that completely transformed the way I view history. It is as if I had been seeing it through a murky, sepia-toned filter that has now been stripped away. I am a student of both history and anthropology, with a particular interest in the meeting of cultures (and the resulting conflicts), and "Guns, Germs, and Steel" has changed the way I approach and analyze those historical events. Diamond writes very well (not just for an academic audience), and for the curious, omnivorous reader this book is definitely worth your time.
Rating:
Summary: Consistent contradiction
Review: I've read some of the reviews of this book, and they in a large part prompted me to buy it. A regular theme in these reviews is how common sense or logical the book is. I found this to be quite the opposite. Several times in the book Diamond asks the reader to forget common sense, or debunks common sense with so-called "scientific proof." While I have no doubt of Mr. Diamond's learned qualifications, I have serious doubts about his objectivity and scientific method. In fact, he freely admits he wrote the book for his friends, the backwards stone-age peoples of New Guinea. I wonder if in fact Mr. Diamond presented a series of arguments he KNOWS are weak, contradictory, and just plain wacko, in order to stimulate some thought and discussion on the matters at hand. Contradictions I found: Diamond states that technology could not drift across geographic barriers, and that some societies never adopted certain technologies not due to their unreceptiveness, but due to the fact that they were never exposed to said technology. In the same chapter, he states that certain crops DID in fact make it across these so-called barriers. But the receiving society never adopted EVERYTHING, just the easy stuff. So why now did they not accept all the technology again? This is a classic catch-22, it's psuedo-science at it's worst. He makes a case that invention is NOT due to particular geniuses, but due to process. Exactly, some societies take existing technology and make it better constantly. I mean, he's making his own argument AGAINST his premise. He states that ancient Mexicans did in fact invent the wheel and axle, but only used it for toys because a human-drawn cart had no advantage over a porter. What? Has this soft-fingered intellectual ever used a wheelbarrow, how about a hand cart to move his books around? Earlier in the book he does state that the wheelbarrow is one of the key inventions that allowed some societies to adopt irrigation. I've got to ask again, did he do this intentionally, (I hope he did,) or is his scientific method and argument really this shoddy? The list goes on. I gave the book 3 stars for it's breadth and well-written style. Mr. Diamond is certainly a well-learned and compelling author. However, the arguments he presents are incredibly weak. If racist groups had any intelligence at all, they could use the book as their premise for existance. This book represents a prejudicial selection of certain scientific facts, leaving others, indeed the bulk, out. If Mr. Diamond had an open mind, he would have changed his premise by the end of the book just by compiling and organizing the facts he presents. I wonder how many scientists are cringing about the Pulitzer Prize (none, since the PP is journalistic, not scientific.) This book is NOT science, it's journalism, written with the now-standard precept of proving a view, instead of presentation of facts. I wonder if Mr. Diamond is still lecturing, I'd love to be in his class and flunk because I tore his arguments to shreds in front of the auditorium. Whatever your view, buy the book and read it. It's definitely compelling, thought-provoking, and WRONG!
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