Point Of Books Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (Civilizations Rise and Fall #1)
Title | : | Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (Civilizations Rise and Fall #1) |
Author | : | Jared Diamond |
Book Format | : | Paperback |
Book Edition | : | Special Edition |
Pages | : | Pages: 425 pages |
Published | : | 2005 by W.W. Norton & Company (first published May 9th 1997) |
Categories | : | History. Nonfiction. Science. Anthropology. Sociology |
Jared Diamond
Paperback | Pages: 425 pages Rating: 4.03 | 269989 Users | 10227 Reviews
Ilustration During Books Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (Civilizations Rise and Fall #1)
"Diamond has written a book of remarkable scope ... one of the most important and readable works on the human past published in recent years."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
Describe Books To Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (Civilizations Rise and Fall #1)
Original Title: | Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies |
ISBN: | 0739467352 (ISBN13: 9780739467350) |
Edition Language: | English |
Series: | Civilizations Rise and Fall #1 |
Literary Awards: | Royal Society Science Book Prize for General Prize (1998), Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction (1998), California Book Award for Nonfiction (Gold) (1997), Puddly Award for History (2001) |
Rating Of Books Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (Civilizations Rise and Fall #1)
Ratings: 4.03 From 269989 Users | 10227 ReviewsAppraise Of Books Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (Civilizations Rise and Fall #1)
What a terrific book. 😍One sentence review: Human history is a function of geography. Detailed review to follow!Why you white men have so much cargo [i.e., steel tools and other products of civilization] and we New Guineans have so little? Jared Diamond is a biologist, who had a passion for studying birds, particularly the birds of New Guinea. But as he came to know and appreciate the many native people he met in his work, the question asked by a New Guinean named Yani remained with him. Why was it that westerners had so much relative to New Guinean natives, who had been living on that land for forty
Terrible. This is one of those books which seems at face value as if it has an interesting and persuasive thesis, and indeed there are a couple of reasonable points in here, but by and large Guns, Germs, and Steel is a poorly written book, shoddily argued and riddled with factual errors. Jared Diamond's thesis is that the differences which one can observe in technological and economic development around the world do not result from racial differences but rather from geographical ones: the
This may be the most over-rated book in the history of book rating. The point he is making is that we in Western Civilazation haven't built skyscrapers, made moon landings, mass produced automobiles, eradicated polio (or for that matter lived indoors with running water) while aborigines in certain remote outposts still hunt and gather in isolated tribes because we are inherently any smarter or more industrious than those individuals. Of course he is mostly right, but why in the 21st century is
The PuristI give you now Professor Twist,A conscientious scientist,Trustees exclaimed, "He never bungles!"And sent him off to distant jungles.Camped on a tropic riverside,One day he missed his loving bride.She had, the guide informed him later,Been eaten by an alligator.Professor Twist could not but smile."You mean," he said, "a crocodile."That bit of Ogden Nash whimsy came into my head as I thought about Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, a reflection on human history through the lens of
[Original review, Dec 10 2008]I liked this book, and it taught me a bunch of things I hadn't known before I read it. Jared Diamond has clearly had a more interesting life than most of us, and spent significant amounts of time in a wide variety of different kinds of society, all over the world. He says he got the basic idea from a conversation he had back in the 70s with a friend in New Guinea. His friend, who later became a leader in the independence movement, wanted to talk about "cargo"
This is what happens when you take an intelligent person, and casually make a few mentions of a field of study they have no knowledge of.Mr. Diamond, NOT an anthropologist, takes Marvin Harris' theory of cultural materialism and uses it to explain everything in life, history, and the current state of the world.Materialism is a way of looking at human culture which, for lack of a better way to explain it easily here, says that people's material needs and goods determine behavior and culture. For
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