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

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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 303.4
EAN: 9780393061314
ISBN: 0393061310
Label: W. W. Norton
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 512
Publication Date: July 11, 2005
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Sales Rank: 418
Studio: W. W. Norton

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Product Description:
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.

Amazon.com:
Explaining what William McNeill called The Rise of the West has become the central problem in the study of global history. In Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond presents the biologist's answer: geography, demography, and ecological happenstance. Diamond evenhandedly reviews human history on every continent since the Ice Age at a rate that emphasizes only the broadest movements of peoples and ideas. Yet his survey is binocular: one eye has the rather distant vision of the evolutionary biologist, while the other eye--and his heart--belongs to the people of New Guinea, where he has done field work for more than 30 years.

Customer Reviews

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Rating:

- Tracing the spread of human culture, language, and empire
Diamond traces the spread of human culture, language, and empire-building across the globe in terms of "geographic determinism"--a pejorative term he deplores: ". . . Societies developed differently on different continents because of differences in continental environments, not in human biology."

Specifically, he traces the ultimate causes that some human societies who (literally and sometimes figuratively) developed guns, germs and steel were able to subjugate the continental areas of the globe: domestication of plants for food, domestication of animals for food, transportation, power, and military purposes, and east/west continental axes that enabled food production techniques and the resulting political organization, language, and technology to spread most quickly.

Diamond makes a compelling case in a way that takes the racism out of much of the "manifest destiny" writing that surrounds ... Read More

Rating:

- so good I bought it for a friend
This book is interesting for those who prefer non-fiction. I bought this book for a friend.

Rating:

- Long Winded. Dull. A Waste of Your Time.
Without a doubt, this has got to be the worst book I have read in a long time. What would have been an interesting blurb in the sociology section of 'Time' magazine, becomes hundreds of pages of pure mindless dreck in the hands of Jared Diamond. Let me save you a few days of your life by summing up the book: The reason why white, western / European societies flourished and the rest of the of the non-white, non-western world did not was because the European climate and terrain favored domestication of plants and animals while the rest of the world's terrain and climate did not. Therefore, western man had more free time on his hands to invent stuff and put a man on the moon, while the rest of the world, to this day, is still screwed up. Wow. I am so annoyed I read this book and wasted so much time doing so.

Rating:

- Great for classroom teachers
While this book is difficult for many high school students, its ideas and the methods used to create his thesis are concepts your students can get. This would be a great jumping off point for an interdisciplinary unit and as the years go on, history and social studies teachers need to change the way we present history if we want students to be ready for the 21st century. In a time when students can get facts right off of Google faster than we could give it to them, we need to teach history as concepts and not focus on students learning only facts. Diamond interprets the facts to create a a thesis on why certain societies excel and come out on top. You could compare and contrast his thesis to the Human Web or the Kennedy's Rise and Fall of Great Powers. On its own, GGS could be a powerful tool in the classroom and teachers of all disciplines should read this text. All texts are biased and no one should expect perfection ... Read More

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