Rating: 
Summary: Great book, but much too long !
Review: The basic thesis of Diamonds book is quite interesting, but seemingly for the sake of scientific accurateness, he feels compelled to make the same points over and over again. This makes the book much too lengthy - he could have done with a better editor.
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Summary: Fascinating book, slips a bit at the end
Review: The first 2/3 is interesting and provocative. Based on the information given, this theory seems pretty sound.I feel the last section, which gives examples to back up his theory, is a bit redundant. Many of the examples were mentioned in the explanation of the theory, and it seemed as if every chapter started out "Why did X conquer Y, instead of Y conquering X?" The excellence and style of the first 2/3 make up for the lag at the end, though.
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Summary: Intriguing theories on the development of the human race
Review: Mr. Diamond explores the theories for the development of civilizations. The book is very plausible and makes an excellent case for the evolution of civilizations from hunter-gather cultures to modern times. His explanation of food evolution and domestication of animals is provocative.
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Summary: Hope this opens the floodgates for a new approach to history
Review: What's so provocative about the book is the reliance on biology and other hard sciences to explain history and culture. Shortly after reading this book, I picked up Consilience by Edward Wilson. The two books share a commitment to applying the methodology of the hard sciences to the social sciences, to ground explanation of social events in molecular processes. Wilson's book is equally gripping.
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Summary: Every man woman and child of every background should read th
Review: Jarod explains how we all got where we are
Rating:
Summary: Author's intent unclear
Review: In the epilogue to this book, the author states explicitly that his intent is not to discount the importance of intelligence to human survival. Rather, his intent is to explain the effects of environment on the developments of societies. It seems clear that random geographical effects alone cannot explain why Europeans had so much "cargo" of their own, while the indigenous peoples of Africa, Australia, and the Americas had so little. This book is a clear description of how geography and random luck influenced the development of societies. But there is much left unanswered. Diamond states that the east-west orientation of Eurasia contributed, in part, to the rapid diffusion of agriculture and other technology. But not all cultures of Eurasia evolved into world-conquering superpowers. For example, France colonized much of Southeast Asia. But according to Diamond's theory, Southeast Asia should have had about the same technology as France because both countries are Eurasian. Not all Eurasian cultures were so successful in their efforts to expand or even survive. For example, the culture of the Egyptian empires lasted for thousands of years but died out, and, has left little but a few crumbling stone tombs. But the culture of Greece had profound and fundamental influences on European and Muslim culture. According to Diamond, both Egyptian and Greek culture should have evolved into superpowers because they both developed in Eurasia. It was the Greeks who passed their ideas on; the Egyptians died and faded away. There is a non-geographical explanation of why the Egyptian empires eventually died out. These empires came to the point where vast amounts of the empire's production were spent, not on infrastructure for use by the living, but on vast resources for the dead! How long can a culture that glorifies death, and spends its treasury on dead emporors, survive? The Greeks did not value death, but knowledge. The Greeks spent time by learning new technologies or inventing better defenses. It's no mistake that the Greeks passed thier legacy on, while the Egyptians did not. So, much is accounted for by considering the geography in which a culture exists. The author needs to state at the beginning of the book that his treatment focuses on the deterministic causes of human societies. He should also state that deterministic causes alone cannot explain all outcomes of world history.
Rating:
Summary: Some parts good, some parts absurd
Review: JD destroys his credibility as a scientist at the beginning of the book when he dismisses hundreds of empirical studies on race and intelligence as flawed, and refutes them all because the New Guineans "seem smarter" to him than other races. Any high school student would be repulsed by such an unscientific method. JD does redeem himself in the remainder of the book with an interesting historical-macroeconomic view of the world. It's a great survey of homo sapiens, especially between 12,000BC - 1AD. I don't agree with his thesis (hard work doesn't matter... just go live in the right climate and you'll be rich!), but picked up a lot of neat facts and I would recommend the book. Other gripes: I could not comprehend the pictures of New Guinean men in the book. Also, JD could have left out an adjective from each sentence in the book without harming the text one bit.
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Summary: Less is More, the truth, the whole truth,...
Review: Read the first few chapters, and the last few. Then dip into specific chapters of interest. The book is so repetitive - it should have been 100 pages, if only publishers would learn that our time is worth more than our money, and we don't buy books by weight. Essentially, very interesting ideas, badly written. Pulitzer obviously rewarded the research and the political position over the quality of the writing. As stated by others, Diamond has an agenda, but that does not invalidate all of his ideas, it simply trucates the thought processes, and leaves some obvious questions unanswered. Some questions that need answering: (1) If Eurasians were better fed for 10,000 years, has that made them more intelligent? If not, then Diamond becomes the first doctor to claim that nutrition is irrelevant during pregnancy or early childhood. (2) More importantly, following from above, is 10,000 years of superior nutrition sufficient to produce evolutionary changes in the brain, such that even when nutrition is equalized in the 20th century (sort of), the Eurasions have had a head start? Diamond would be more credible if he asked some of these questions, which logically follow from his own thesis. Another point - the title is misleading. The book has one chapter on germs, and mentions guns and steel as part of the big picture. But the basic thesis is about food and geography. Nevertheless, the book is thought-provoking, and the ideas are well argued, they just may not be the whole truth.
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Summary: Compelling, Fascinating, Enlightening...A Major Contribution
Review: Jared Diamond has drawn together widely disparate strings of human history over the last 13,000 years to create a compelling and masterfully researched thesis: environmental factors, not cultural or racial ones, have driven the broad trends of civilization and the disparities among the "haves" and "have nots." Almost every chapter of this book, and the overall thesis, should prove fascinating to even the most widely read scholar or diletante. And it is very difficult to imagine a work of such importance being any easier to read. (By the way, the customers in this poll who rated the book with one star portray the work inaccurately.)
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Summary: Profoundly influential book
Review: I came across a review written by Bill Gates (Microsoft CEO) and decided to read it as soon as possible. I was not disappointed. This book finally puts to bed all racist, nationalistic, or "ordained by divine right" theories that people the world over have conjured up in the past to advance their own claims of superiority over others. Dominance and influence has often flowed from the subtle, capability-enhancing advantages afforded by geography and climate rather than from an "inherent" God-given individual superiority. This book is very comprehensive and systematically examines all issues to leave no doubt as to which factors are most influential in societal advancement. Computers and the Internet are diminishing the advantages enjoyed by some in the past (e.g. geography is no longer as important as it used to be for production of intellectual capital). Thus, this book is valuable not just for the sweeping account of the reasons why certain societies advanced in past, but it also serves as a useful guide of the factors that will influence the rise of tomorrow's leaders.
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