Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies | Jared Diamond

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies | Jared Diamond | Is Western Society truly superior?

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Guns, Germs, and S...

	Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies Jared Diamond W. W. Norton, 2005 - 512 pages average customer review:based on 1073 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

With a new chapter. The phenomenal bestseller?over 1.5 million copies sold?is now a major PBS special.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Guns, Germs, and Steel is a brilliant work answering the question of why the peoples of certain continents succeeded in invading other continents and conquering or displacing their peoples. This edition includes a new chapter on Japan and all-new illustrations drawn from the television series.

Until around 11,000 BC, all peoples were still Stone Age hunter/gatherers. At that point, a great divide occurred in the rates that human societies evolved. In Eurasia, parts of the Americas, and Africa, farming became the prevailing mode of existence when indigenous wild plants and animals were domesticated by prehistoric planters and herders. As Jared Diamond vividly reveals, the very people who gained a head start in producing food would collide with preliterate cultures, shaping the modern world through conquest, displacement, and genocide.

The paths that lead from scattered centers of food to broad bands of settlement had a great deal to do with climate and geography. But how did differences in societies arise? Why weren't native Australians, Americans, or Africans the ones to colonize Europe? Diamond dismantles pernicious racial theories tracing societal differences to biological differences.

He assembles convincing evidence linking germs to domestication of animals, germs that Eurasians then spread in epidemic proportions in their voyages of discovery. In its sweep, Guns, Germs and Steel encompasses the rise of agriculture, technology, writing, government, and religion, providing a unifying theory of human history as intriguing as the histories of dinosaurs and glaciers. 32 illustrations.

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Fascinating!

It took me a while to open this book, as I was absolutely convinced that, with a title like Guns, Germs and Steel, the subject could only be war. Eventually, however, I opened the book, and was absolutely fascinated by it. The premise of the book is Yali's question. Yali, a native of New Guinea, has never been out of his country, is "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?"
The answer to this question takes about 430 pages of very interesting reading, going back to the rise and spread of food production, from food to guns, germs and steel, around the world in 5 chapters. The writer, Jared Diamond delves into pre-history, how and why the nomadic hunter/gatherers became more stationary, and started to form villages, and what effect that had on their way of life. What is necessary to sustain villages. The advance of specialisation. Why some areas were more susceptible to change than others. The geographic climate that helped or hindered.
As I say, this is a very interesting book, and one that will long live with you. However, it is perhaps rather hard reading, insofar as it is written probably for college students. It is not a book that should be read in a hurry, but should be savoured.

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Is Western Society truly superior?

I was tempted to give Jared 5 stars based on the extent of his information and his strength of his argument. I gave him only 4 stars because, although I think he is 75% correct, I think he has ignored or denies factors that may be important.

Early in his book, Kali, an intelligent New Guinean and would-be shaker and mover asks a significant question. "Why does the white man have more cargo [goods, stuff, useful things] than we do? Jared, correctly in my opinion, refutes the politically incorrect view that New Guineans must be less intelligent than whites. Quite the contrary, Jared asserts. New Guineans, on the average, are more intelligent than whites.

A little like Jared, I've had the opportunity to live with 'primitive' people and have seen their superiority to me in things like bushcraft, tracking, spacial orientation and other things....yet.... they are not necessarily more intelligent than I am. Their experience is simply different than mine. I agree, however, that they are, on the average, intelligent people dealing with problems somewhat different those of 'civilized' individuals.

Jared attributes the dominance of Western Man over almost all other peoples of the earth because of our geographical location and because of the fortuitous presence of large wild animals that had the potential for domestication i.e. animals like the auroch, wild horse, ibex, wild sheep etc. In the Americas, for instance--despite the fact that the meso-Americans and Andean peoples may have been superior to Western peoples in terms of agriculture--the only domesticatable wild animal available to them may have been the vicuna. Therefore, native-americans were obliged to carry things themselves. Hence Cortes conquered Mexico, rather than Montezuma conquering Spain.....but....We know, from toys discovered that the ancient Americans understood the wheel. Why then didn't they discover the wheel-barrow propelled by a single person? It would have made the construction of monuments and almost everything else, a lot easier.

Maybe. On the other hand, the horse, cattle, sheep, goats and a myriad of other creatures were available to the peoples of the entire 'old world.' Despite this, Europeans and Middle Easterners made the most effective use of them. Why?

Indeed, why? Let me postulate another couple of scenario. Let us imagine, that human societies spread over the earth are like the atmosphere spread over the earth. Why a storm in one place and not another? Perhaps a very minor, almost imperceptible perturbation, causes major changes down the line. A slight shift in atmospheric pressure over China and there's a devastating hurricane in Louisiana...a slight cultural perturbation, perhaps in now Albania, and Pizarro burns Atahualpa at the stake? Maybe the 'superiority' of Western culture is no more than a happenstance.

Also, although now largely discredited, who really knows if there are differences in the way that different brains work? This is not to say that certain brains are necessarily 'better' than others but that they might be different. Also, who is to say that industrialized, 'civilized' society is better than hunter gatherer societies? In many ways, it isn't. Civilized society is ulcerogenic. Hunter-gatherer societies are probably more satisfying and fun. Genesis, in the Bible, talks of man being thrown out of Paradise and having to work by the sweat of his brow. This is almost certainly an allegory about the replacement of enjoyable and care-free hunter-gatherer existence as opposed to the drudgery of early civilization.

Why is domination a function of a pressure wave produced by black powder in a pipe propelling a leaden slug? Luck?

Ron Braithwaite author of novels--"Skull Rack" and "Hummingbird God"--on the Conquest of Mexico

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Great subject and treatment - shakey science

I know everyone says this - just adding my voice.

The author needs to define his terms - what does he mean by 'smart' when talking about the New Guineans. What does he mean by calling Australia 'backwards'? I wish he developed these vague/biased terms.

Exactly the answers I wanted in twice the length I needed

I'd wondered for a long time why certain aspects of history that you learn as facts in school turned out the way they did, e.g. why European diseases basically wiped out Native Americans but not vice-versa. I bought the book because I heard that Jared Diamond answered these types of questions. He does, to an extent. At the very least, he gives convincing arguments for why history turned out the way it did based on the traits of geographic regions. The best part about having read this book is that now I feel like I can open a world map and use it to explain to someone why Eurasia came to dominate the world and not people from somewhere else. The argument is speculation, but it's convincing and sound enough for my satisfaction. In that way, it's exactly what I wanted.

The only problem isn't in the content; it's in the fact that Diamond just didn't write a perfect book around that content, so I'll give him four stars instead of five. If it had been about two-thirds the length, it might have been perfect. Instead, I sometimes got the feeling that Diamond was thinking, "I've made a really great point here, and it's done, but if I talked about this example for a few more pages this book would look nice and fat wedged into the shelf at the bookstore." Nevertheless, my questions did get answered, and overall I recommend this to anyone who wants a geographic perspective on historic trends.

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