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

New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999. Reprint. Later printing. Trade paperback. Good.. 494, [2] pages. Illustrations. Further Readings. Index. Minor damp staining at top and bottom, affecting several pages slightly. Diamond is an American scientist and author best known for his popular science books The Third Chimpanzee, Guns, Germs, and Steel (awarded a Pulitzer Prize), Collapse and The World Until Yesterday. Diamond's work is known for drawing from a variety of fields, including anthropology, ecology, geography, and evolutionary biology. He is currently Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. He won the National Medal of Science in 1999. In Guns, Diamond sought to explain the political and economic dominance of Eurasian societies over those from other parts of the world throughout history. Using evidence from archaeological and historical case studies and evidence from genetics and linguistics, he argued that gaps in power and technology between human societies are not primarily caused by cultural or racial differences. 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 had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed 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.