Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

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.

Book Description

Why did Eurasians conquer, displace, or decimate Native Americans, Australians and Africans, instead of the reverse? In this groundbreaking book, evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors actually responsible for shaping the modern world. Societies that had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed writing, technology and government, and organized religion - as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war.

"The scope and explanatory power of this book are astounding." (The New Yorker)