Guns, Germs, and Steel (Jared Diamond)

This book is kicking my ass - but in a good way. Typically, if I'm not able to finish a book in a week, I'll put it down and forget about it. I've been plowing through Guns, Germs, and Steel for about 8 weeks now. I can only read about five pages of his dense, detailed writing per night before falling asleep. But I'm still liking it. It's basically the meaning of life - from how we started growing almonds, to why Hippos are not domesticated, to why 80 Spaniards we're able to defeat 800K incas. I'm not buying all of it, but Diamond makes credible, well researched arguments.

Excellent, readable book that presents a logical case for the reasons that societies developed in different manners, with different technologies.While it is repetitive in places (Diamond works his experiences in New Guinea a little too hard) it is well worth reading, and does much to dispell the racist "intellectual superiority" myths.

Guns, Germs, and Steel is probably the only book that I read based on praise from fans of a computer game. Other fans of the Civilization series highly recommended this book, so I decided I should read it. While it is much more enjoyable to read than a textbook, it doesn't exactly read like a novel either, but it is well worth the occasional slow parts. While I hadn't really thought about why western civilization basically took over the world, after reading Diamond's presentation of his conclusions, the answers almost seem like common sense.

Guns, germs and steel is a gem! It is a wonderful analysis of the historical and scientific literature about human societies. While the author tries to explain why societies developed differently, he takes us through a fantastic journey of learning that ends up with the reader reaching a higher understanding of its own place within the society he/she lives in.

I wish Wiggum was still with us-the best book reviewer on this site, IMO. I read this book and liked it a lot, but had the same reservations about it as he did. Read his review here, and his others too!

EXCELLENT, thought-provoking, intelligent book! I think what I love most about this work is Mr. Diamond's treatment of VARIOUS cultures and peoples, and his disproving of racist explainations as to why some peoples have come to dominate, exterminate or displace others. He views ALL people as equal, and shows that chance and accident CAN have a huge affect on history and culture. If you like to think about the "whys" and "hows" of things, then this book is for you!

This book sums up the history of all humankind in a way that is so simple and obvious (at least it seems so after reading it). If you are not familiar with anthropology or ancient history, this is the only book you need to read. All the more era-specific books I have read simply support the theory of this title. It is well written so that even a buffoon would be fascinated by it and yet it still could make an expert on the subject stop and think. Brilliant.

Well-researched, and presented in a readable style.

I really enjoyed this book, but I'm not completely convinced it's worthy of the Pulitzer Prize it won. Essentially "Guns, Germs, and Steel" makes the argument that civilizations advanced at different rates in different places primarily because of environmental factors, not because of differences in intelligence or work ethic. Diamond argues, for example, that complex societies arose first in the Fertile Crescent and in China because both of those areas possessed an abundance of wild plants and large mammals that happened to be highly suitable for domestication. But in Australia, on the other hand, aborigines never developed complex societies because they lacked the easily-domesticatable plants and animals that would have led them from a hunting/gathering lifestyle to sedentary farming. Societies that moved from hunting/gathering to farming could support denser populations as well as specialists (scribes, bureaucrats, soldiers), which were key ingredients for creating advanced socie... Read more

This is a brilliant book -- deserved the Pulitzer it won last year. Fascinating ideas about the unequal development of cultures on different contintents, well written and strongly supported with scientific and archeological information. One of the best non-fiction books I've read in a while.