Guns, Germs, and Steel

The Fates of Human Societies

De: Jared Diamond

Narrado por: Grover Gardner

Duración: 5 h y 58 m

Resumen del Editor

Pulitzer Prize Winner, General Nonfiction, 1998

In this groundbreaking work, evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors actually responsible for history's broadest patterns. It is a story that spans 13,000 years of human history, beginning when Stone Age hunter-gatherers constituted the entire human population. Guns, Germs, and Steel is a world history that really is a history of all the world's peoples, a unified narrative of human life.

©1997 Jared Diamond (P)2001 HighBridge Company

Reseñas de la Crítica

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

"Guns, Germs, and Steel is an artful, informative, and delightful book....There is nothing like a radically new angle of vision for bringing out unsuspected dimensions of a subject." (The New York Review of Books)

Where is the Unabridged?

I listened to this abridged book for a book club and I thought it was very interesting. However, I missed important concepts that the other readers in my book club picked up from the reading the entire book. When and if the unabridged is available, I want to listen to that.

Highly Intriguing

Really helps to bring current socio-political issues into perspective

How societies evolved…

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond is a fascinating exploration of why some societies became more technologically advanced than others. Since I look at things with a horticultural view, my favorite part of the book was Diamond's discussion about the domestication of crops and animals. He explains how this process allowed societies to become more sedentary and develop complex social structures.

I found Diamond's analysis of the impact of geography on the development of societies particularly intriguing. He argues that the latitudes of different regions played a crucial role in determining which crops and animals could be domesticated. For example, the plants that were domesticated in South America could not be grown in other parts of the world due to the region's unique latitudes and large ranges of climates. Farming was unable to be spread with a smaller range from east to west than north to south, versus a more east-to-west Eurasian continent with more consistent climates.

It made me wonder how the world would be different if the latitudes of South America were laid out differently. Would different crops have been domesticated, and so, would societies in this region have developed differently? Diamond's book raises thought-provoking questions about the complex factors that contribute to the development of human societies.

Amazingly entertaining

You'd think the subject matter would lend itself to a slow, plodding book - it doesn't. It's compelling an interesting.

For a layman's curiosity in evolution of civility.

Interesting read. This books offers historical perspectives to the modern classification of societies from the first to the third worlds.

Guns, Germs, and Steel, intresting....

I found this book wanting for better examples, but in whole, a good read.

Boring narrator

I may have to return this book because the narrator would constantly put me to sleep. It felt like a 5 hour dry lecture. Sorry narrator

Any believe it took me so long to finally listen

Should have read this when it first came out. Wonderful book when it changes the way I consider the world around me.

a decent listen

i did not love the book, but the narration is clear, and it was a reasonably interesting listen. just not particularly memorable.

Expected more ...

The premise of the book is fascinating and it started out with great promise ... but soon lapsed into a pretty rudimentary review of human history, travel, and evolution. I stopped and started it a lot because it became a bit dull towards the middle. In the end, I don't feel like the author really answered the question he set out to answer. Maybe there was just too much hype ...