[EnviroEngr]

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.

Product Description: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize. 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.

[julianj]

I second that!

An excellent book, does humble you a bit, to find that the "superiority" of the West is more or less down to luck and geography.

It is also readable, with many interesting facts and incidents that otherwise most people will have never known.

[Ayoob_Reloaded]

Yeah, great book. There was a section about a group of hunters that migrated through islands in Indonesia some very long time ago. As the hunters made their way across the islands, they came upon a bunch of animals that had never seen humans and so weren't afraid of them. These guys just hunted everything to extinction fairly quickly before they discovered animal husbandry, and their descendants became gatherers instead of hunters, and all their hunting technology was lost. They used up everything and just ended up picking plants to survive.

[gary_malcolm]

Two thumbs up. Way up.

If you want to think about man as an intregral part of nature ( or just want to wake up to that thought ) this is a handsome introduction.

[EnviroEngr]

See: http://www.peakoil.com/fortopic3815.html
for a recent article by Jared.

Also: http://www.peakoil.com/fortopic3930.html

[Yavicleus]

Agree. Excellent scholarly, yet approachable and fun to read book.