Rating: 
Summary: An interesting subject, a tedious book
Review: I launched into this book with enthusiasm. The subject was close to my heart - why are some societies strong and others weak - and the author's basic proposition was sound - accidents of geography are to blame rather than racial factors. But then came the Prologue ... where we learn about the superior intelligence of New Guinea children because they don't sit around all day and watch TV like Western children. Later, the author also gives us a little holiday snap about running out of water in the Australian outback, which presumably demonstrates Europeans' low intelligence compared with Australian Aborigines. That's a bit like arguing that I am pretty smart because I know where all the pubs in Sydney are. Jared Diamond wants history to be taken seriously as a science, but he has done his cause no favours with this sort of stuff. What we get is a few good ideas - food production, literacy, disease, etc. - which support his thesis; what we don't get are the obvious - though not so palatable - cultural, religious, etc. factors. Why have Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand done better than Burma, Laos and India? Why have the Chinese prospered wherever they have gone? And how did a few Mongolian nomadic sheepherders manage to conquer most of Eurasia? The reasons given for Europe's dominance over China in the last 500 years - Columbus was able to shop around different nations for a sponsor, which he could not have done in a unified China, and (with maps to illustrate it) Europe's bumpier coastline - are a bit silly. And what about the United States pre-eminence during the twentieth century? One could put up with all of this if the book was a good read. It is not. It is wordy, ponderous, and sometimes patronising. The author has a few important points to make - especially concerning livestock raising and agriculture - and, just so we won't forget, he keeps repeating them. How many times do we read about the spread of food production from the Fertile Crescent? We even get at least one reminder about the smart New Guinea children. Some worth, but don't spend too much time on it.
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Summary: this could be the answer or part of it
Review: there is a difference between gm(geomagnetic) equator and gg(geografic) equator.(it effects "fertile crescent");but the interesting difference is the effect of negative pole versus positive pole with people:posistive is more harmful than negative and we all know how dangerous the added positive supply provided by the sun can be to your exposed skin. think about people that live in the southern emisphere, why is their skin so dark? positive pole also has an effect on bacterial growth. negative has a very good effect on regenerating of human cells.in other words it is much better to live in the north emisphere than southern. the overwhelming effects of the sun rays(f.i.r.) are balanced by relaxing night effects of geomagnetic negative pole.i invite author to verify the gm maps. enrico rosati
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent for non-technical reading
Review: While it is difficult for me to give an very high rating for a book that doesn't present its source material well, I must say that this book presents a very compelling theory in a clear and concise way for laypersons such as myself. As an undergraduate five years ago studying the history of Africa, I pored over pages and pages of articles regarding the Bantu population expansion and came away with no clue of its significance. This book cleared that up in a matter of minutes. Anyone who has wondered why civilizations have had different paths of development should definitely read this book. Anyone foolish enough to think that genetic or racial factors were decisive had better read this book and then face the challenge of refuting its primary argument.
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Summary: Excellent easy to understand entry into modern anthropology.
Review: A great read,. This book provides some valuable insites into how and why societies are where they are today. Highly recommended to individuals who want to gain a deeper understanding of how various civilizations arose; and those who want to look beyond their traditional western and eurocentric history lessons.
Rating:
Summary: Valid ideas, well-presented
Review: Diamond takes on an extremely complicated topic that spans essentially all of human history and boils it down to some very basic premises. For example, he argues that Eurasia (i.e. Europe and Asia) enjoyed the advantage of the lion's share of the most desirable and domesticatable grains and large mammals. This advantage led to earlier agriculture, which led to denser populations, which led to more specialization, which led to better technology and organization, which led to societies better equipped to wage war and conquer their neighbors. Other reviewers, however, take Diamond to task. But is this premise really so darn controversial? The idea that the Fertile Crescent had a nice variety of native large-seeded, protein rich, perennial grains is not new. Heck, I learned as much in my History of Agriculture class as an undergrad (10 years ago). If you believe that Europe was somehow destined to rule the world because of some innate cultural and/or genetic superiority, this book is not for you. If you want wonderful insight into the biogeography of different regions of the earth, and how these differences contributed to differences in development, check out this book. I simply could not put it down.
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Summary: Great book
Review: Fascinating book. I think some of the below criticisms are not quite fair--this is not meant to be a scholarly book. It's much better, it's a scientific book written for the layman, a rare gem today.Is it somewhat PC? Yeah, but really, the book is so good overall that it's easy to overlook that. I personally think the author did an admirable job of looking at the human civilizations all across the globe rather than concentrating only on European civilizations, as lot of other books do. You can't really study human civilization without looking at non-Western cultures, since we must remember that Europe (and I'm not including Greece , Rome, and other meditteranean cultures that are clearly NOT Western European) has been at the periphery of civilization for most of human history. Overall the book is a monumental work, work that will surely change our understanding of human culture and civilizations.
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Summary: What a Great Book!
Review: A very compelling and readable (excepting the prologue) explanation of the major aspects of human development beyond the Hunter Gatherer stage. It happily completes the unholy trinity of: "The Selfish Gene", "The Moral Animal" and "Guns, Germs and Steel"
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Summary: Superb!
Review: Fascinating, illuminating, in-depth, very well argued, extremely convincing and usefull - best book I have read in years. One of a kind and surely difficult to beat.
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Summary: A page-turner
Review: If you read the reviews below, you'll have noticed that the reaction to this book was very polarized (I almost said "black and white"). Many readers enjoyed it thoroughly and found it very stimulating. A number of readers, however, savaged it in a fairly emotional tone. The readers who panned the book fall into several groups, dominated by the ones who just can't get past that off-hand comment in the introduction of the book concerning the author's conviction that his hunter-gatherer friends in New Guinea seem more intelligent on average than his friends of European descent. Lighten up. All he was saying was that he had difficulty with the thesis that agriculturally-based societies consistently trounce hunter-gather societies because of genetically determined intellectual superiority, given that hunter-gatherers have to live on their wits while in the case of members of agricultural, animal-domesticating societies, natural selection has operated more to favor immunity to the childhood diseases peculiar to those societies. So Diamond searched for another explanation, and came up with one that's consistently interesting, though obviously not foolproof: Eurasian societies happened to have access to a high-protein cereal (wheat) with a reproductive method amenable to quick and easy tinkering by humans, which grew in an area with few geographical barriers to east-west diffusion, thus avoiding the need for adaptation of the crop to the shorter or longer days of other latitudes. In the New World, in contrast, the available grain (ancestral corn) had lower protein, was more vulnerable to excessive hybridization by wild unimproved crops, and faced barriers to transmission along the predominantly North-South axis of the combined continents. Why the emphasis on cereals, a product of temperate climates, rather than the foods relied on by the original proto-humans in Africa? Cereal was critical because it was adapted to a climate with a severe dry season, which encouraged development of a plant whose survival strategy was become an annual that concentrated its food value in a rich seed that could survive a drought before resprouting, rather than a perennial that invested in permanent structure, bark, etc. This is the kind of food that permitted early humans to experiment with gathering and storing excess food. Why the emphasis on ease of diffusion? Because the author believes that cultural and technological innovation occur more quickly when large numbers of diverse, well-fed societies could experiment independently and then communicate with one another. You don't have to buy any of this, but his evidence for each proposition (and the many others in his book) certainly is worth a look. Another category of harsh critics points to the book's repetitiousness (a fair criticism) and to the popular-science approach of summarizing the work of other scientists in a Reader's Digest fashion. This may be a fair criticism, too, but unless you're terrifically well trained in a number of fields of science, do you think it is likely to bother you? Personally I'd have liked to hear more of the author's views on how to explain the dominance of the horse-mounted waves of Eurasian invaders. Clearly this book works best from the end of the last Ice Age through about 1 A.D., and for conflicts among continents rather than within each continent.
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Summary: The Origins of Civilization
Review: Jared Diamond attempts to explain the entire development of humanity in the last 13,000 years in this volume, an overly ambitious project, no doubt. While the answer he provides contains a tremendous amount of truth and represents a major step forward in understanding human history, there are many variables that he leaves out. Diamond explains development in terms of biogeography, with cultivable grains, domesticable animals, and an East-West geographic axis. This combination leads to an agricultural surplus, larger populations, specialized occupations, and better technology. This powerful combination leads to farmer societies developing more quickly than hunter-gatherers. While his thesis is valuable and the new information he brings is astonishing, Diamond's theory is also deterministic and reductionist. There are too many other factors we also have to examine as well. One major factor is a culture's ability to harness its resources into a logical economic system. This has been discussed in detail by David Landes, whose work does not conflict with Diamond's but complements it. And ultimately, we cannot treat human beings as machines that are the same everywhere in the world, but that vary due to climate and geography, just like all other species. To explain human development, we also need to include humans in the discussion. This is a seemingly obvious point, but one that Diamond does not address since his goal is discount racism. But to say the races are different is not to say that one is better. If we refuse to look at race, we can't understand humanity.
To begin with, Diamond states technological change is due to the "inventor-genius," a lone individual whose innovation changes society. The larger the population, the more such individuals will be found. However, the populations in East Asia were always greater than in Europe. Despite that fact, most inventions came from Europe, particularly after 1500 AD. I suggest the answer may be that Europeans for some reason have a higher percentage of geniuses in their populations than Asians do, even though as a whole, Europeans might be slightly less intelligent than Asians. In general, Diamond cannot really explain why Europe developed before East Asia although his theory does explain why Eurasia developed before the rest of the world. At some point, however, we need to look at people if we are to understand history. At this point in our research on human biodiversity there are still many unanswered questions. But we should not shy away from asking more as Diamond does. For we may yet discover more reasons why Europeans developed before others. Ultimately, the major usefullness of this book is in explaining why civilizations developed where they did, first in Mesopotamia, and then east and west of that location. But it does not explain much after the origins of these civilizations: Why some areas developed quicker than others even after both had the requisite guns, germs, and steel remains unanswered by this theory. And it certainly can't explain the disparity in among modern societies.
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