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Guns, Germs & Steel: Summary and book reviews of Guns, Germs & Steel by Jared Diamond, plus links to an excerpt from Guns, Germs & Steel and a biography of Jared Diamond.
Guns, Germs & Steel
by
Jared Diamond
Hardcover: Mar 1997,
480 pages.
Paperback: Apr 1999,
480 pages.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a national bestseller: the global account of the rise of civilization that is also a stunning refutation of ideas of human development based on race.
In this "artful, informative, and delightful" (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. Societies that had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed writing, technology, government, and organized religion—as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war—and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, the Rhone-Poulenc Prize, and the Commonwealth Club of California's Gold Medal
Book Reviews
Kirkus Reviews
While you have heard many of these arguments before, Diamond has brought them together convincingly. The prose is not brilliant and there are apologies and redundancies that we could do without. But a fair answer to Yali's question this surely is, and gratifyingly, it makes clear that race has nothing to do with who does or does not develop cargo.
The New York Review of Books - William H McNeil Guns, Germs and Steel is an artful, informative and delightful book...there is nothing like a radically new angle of vision for bringing out unsuspected dimensions of subject and that is what Jared Diamond has done.
The New Yorker
The scope and explanatory power of this book are astounding.
New York Times Book Review - James Shreeve
An ambitious, highly important book.
Washington Times - Martin Sieff
Serious, groundbreaking biological studies of human history only seem to come along once every generation or so. . . . Now [Guns, Germs, and Steel] must be added to their select number. . . . Diamond meshes technological mastery with historical sweep, anecdotal delight with broad conceptual vision, and command of sources with creative leaps. No finer work of its kind has been published this year, or for many past.
Los Angeles Times - Alfred W. Crosby
[Diamond] is broadly erudite, writes in a style that pleasantly expresses scientific concepts in vernacular American English, and deals almost exclusively in questions that should interest everyone concerned about how humanity has developed. . . . [He] has done us all a great favor by supplying a rock-solid alternative to the racist answer. . . . A wonderfully interesting book.
The New Leader - Thomas M. Disch
An epochal work. Diamond has written a summary of human history that can be accounted, for the time being, as Darwinian in its authority.
Washington Post Book World - David Brown
A fascinating and extremely important book. That its insights seem so fresh, its facts so novel and arresting, is evidence of how little Americans—and, I suspect, most well-educated citizens of the Western world—know of the most important forces of human history.
Colin Renfrew,, Nature
Diamond has written a book of remarkable scope . . . one of the most important and readable works on the human past published in recent years.
Colin Renfrew,, Nature
Diamond has written a book of remarkable scope . . . one of the most important and readable works on the human past published in recent years.
Bill Gates Guns, Germs and Steel lays a foundation for understanding human history, which makes it fascinating in its own right. Because it brilliantly describes how chance advantages can lead to early success in a highly competitive environment, it also offers useful lessons for the business world and for people interested in why technologies succeed.
Edward O. Wilson, Pellegrino University Professor, Harvard University
No scientist brings more experience from the laboratory and field, none thinks more deeply about social issues or addresses them with greater clarity, than Jared Diamond as illustrated by Guns, Germs, and Steel. In this remarkably readable book he shows how history and biology can enrich one another to produce a deeper understanding of the human condition.
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