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Cover of Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond

Guns, Germs, and Steel

Jared Diamond

  • 528 pages · about 9 hours
  • First published 1997
  • 61 editions
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1 About this book

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, published in 1997, is Jared Diamond's attempt to answer a question put to him by Yali, a politician in Papua New Guinea: why did Europeans come to have so much more power and so many more goods than his own people? Diamond rejects any explanation based on the supposed superiority of one people over another. He argues that the differences go back to geography: which regions had plants and animals that could be domesticated, how easily crops and inventions could spread, and how farming led step by step to dense populations, technology, organized states and the diseases that devastated peoples who had never met them. The book draws on biology, geography, anthropology and history.

  • Effect of environment on
  • Social evolution
  • History
  • Biological Evolution
  • Cultural Evolution
  • Social Environment
  • Human beings, effect of environment on
  • Civilization, history

2 What to expect

A big-picture history that asks why some societies came to dominate others, and answers with geography, not race or genius. Diamond builds his case step by step, from the domestication of plants and animals to germs, writing and states, across thirteen thousand years and every continent. It is clear but long and repetitive, heavy on evidence about crops and livestock, and specialists have criticized it for making environment explain too much.

Good for readers who want: big-picture world history, geography and human societies, and a bold, sweeping argument.

3 About Jared Diamond

Born 1937

Jared Mason Diamond (born September 10, 1937) is an American scientist, historian, and author. He has written hundreds of scientific and popular articles and books, most notably Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), which received multiple awards, including the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. In 2005, Diamond was ranked ninth on a poll by Prospect and Foreign Policy of the world's top 100 public intellectuals.

Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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