• Guns, Germs, and Steel

  • The Fates of Human Societies
  • By: Jared Diamond
  • Narrated by: Grover Gardner
  • Length: 5 hrs and 58 mins
  • 3.9 out of 5 stars (2,113 ratings)

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Guns, Germs, and Steel

By: Jared Diamond
Narrated by: Grover Gardner
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Publisher's summary

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

Critic reviews

"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)

What listeners say about Guns, Germs, and Steel

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars

Badly Abridged

This book is actually quite excellent, his science is quite sound, and his theory is amazing.

But, some of the complaints of other reviewers stem from the extent to which this book was abridged. Not only were critical details sliced out throughout the audiobook, but the ENTIRE LAST 1/4 was just chopped off! Answers about race, trade and other issues are addresed here. I only found out, when I saw the DVD of it by PBS, and saw an entire episode of what I thought was completely new material! I like "Collapse" even more, and was upset to learn it was just as badly chopped up. Five stars for Diamond, 0 stars for the publisher for ripping us all off!

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69 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars

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.

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52 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars

Good writer, flawed theory

Jared Diamond is an excellent author, and so would this book be, if only his theorizing were true and unflawed. But it's not. He starts the book by stating that he's out to destroy the claim that genetic differences is the cause of the global disparity in civilizational achivement between different peoples and races, a claim he considers low and immoral. Then he proceeds by asserting that the inhabitants of Papua New Guinea are genetically superior to whites. This self-contradiction is not rendered any less stupid by the fact that it's done without reference to any evidence beyond the mere hunch of the author.

The main argument of the book is that different peoples have made civilizations that differ not because the peoples themselves are of varying genetic giftedness, but because they've been unequally procured by their respective environments with the ingredients necessary for civilization-building, chiefly: crops suitable for agriculture, animals suitable for domestication, soil suitable for farming, and habitats spacious enough to support the numbers of humans needed to preserve knowledge through hard times, and located in connection to other sites of civilization in an horizontal fashion, rather than a vertical one. This argument is all very well and quite plausible, but mr. Diamond forgets something. Although it's possible that it was the uniquely beneficial environment which laid the foundation for the Eurasian civilizational preeminence, that doesn't prove that all races are equally intellectually gifted today. Instead, it might very well be that once the civilizational process is begun, there emerges a feedback effect, which by making the more intelligent in each generation more fit for reproduction, gradually increases the overall cognitive ability of the peoples inhabiting the evolving civilisations. Being smart in civilization is beneficial for your chances of reproducing yourself, and so the smarties get more numerous. Mr. Diamond doesn't see this.

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48 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars

The review mentioning New Guinea is wrong.

"Then he proceeds by asserting that the inhabitants of Papua New Guinea are genetically superior to whites. This self-contradiction is not rendered any less stupid by the fact that it's done without reference to any evidence beyond the mere hunch of the author."
This reviewer says it is the "mere hunch" of the author. I disagree strongly. The author states it as a theory and gives several good reasons from his years of study. He does NOT say that they are inherently better than whites, but they are genetically superior because they have be more self-sufficient and the ones who are not self-sufficient die off much more quickly. If I had lived at another time, I may have been an invalid or died at an early age due to an accident with my poor eyesight and allergies. In this age, I am probably healthier than most. Not my favorite book, but certainly not bad.

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43 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars

Abridged

Interesting concepts. The abridged version missed many of the detail and richness that may have made the book a best seller. It felt as if the narrator read only the first and last sentence of each paragraph.

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39 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

flawed review

The author of that particular review seems to have taken issue with an imagined slight against northern Europeans.

>>He starts the book by stating that he's out to destroy the claim that genetic differences is the cause of the global disparity in civilizational achivement between different peoples and races, a claim he considers low and immoral. Then he proceeds by asserting that the inhabitants of Papua New Guinea are genetically superior to whites. This self-contradiction is not rendered any less stupid by the fact that it's done without reference to any evidence beyond the mere hunch of the author. <<

That is a mischaracterization of a key thesis. Diamond refuted the notion that genetic variation between races lead to a disparity of intelligence producing a decisive competitive advantage to Indo-europeans. Diamond noted that many of the indigenous people he'd encountered may have relied on primitive technologies, however in no way did they appear to be "slow thinking". However, he made no claims that New Guineans or any other race enjoyed "genetically superior intelligence".

He did however note that by virtue of centuries of living with domesticated animals and high population densities, the Indo-europeans and Asians enjoyed a relative resistance to diseases characteristic of those environments. This in turn led to a decisive advantage as these peoples unwittingly unleashed their germs (note the title) on unresistant populations.

>>it might very well be that once the civilizational process is begun, there emerges a feedback effect, which by making the more intelligent in each generation more fit for reproduction, gradually increases the overall cognitive ability of the peoples inhabiting the evolving civilisations. <<

The reviewer is obvioulsy offering a pet idea that lacks substantiation. I think we can forgive Diamond for not including it.

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33 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars

Diamond sadly misses the obvious

Though feeling good about Diamond's agreement to some of the principles of my book, "The Evolution Diet," I was feeling fairly unimpressed throughout "Guns, Germs, and Steel." The title, seemingly influenced by more appropriately named books by Marvin Harris like "Cannibals and Kings," and "Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches," attempts to clump together things that wouldn't normally be clumped together. In this case, it doesn't really work- some are reasons for why certain cultures thrived, but another is a result. This inconsistency indicates what becomes clear throughout the book, Diamond really doesn't have a strong point.

Sure, Diamond shows how certain foods allowed for the rapid growth of population that was needed for advanced civilizations and comes up with insightful reasons for success like wide East-West expansion in Eurasia, but not in the Americas and Africa. However, Diamond misses the single-most important factor in why some cultures advanced and others didn't: trade. Sure he grazes over the idea and pretty much offers the proof when he shows why Australian peoples failed to thrive despite having enough natural resources. Trade explains why the multicultural and highly populated Eurasian peoples excelled and the others didn't. The proof is seen in the capitals of advanced civilizations, which, throughout history were located at the center of trade routes (the Fertile Crescent, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Arabia, then France, Holland, and England, and eventually America).

Another irksome tendency in "Guns" is Diamond's racial labeling, which is common elsewhere, but brought to the forefront in this book, which focuses on the differences between races.

Overall, "Guns," reveals a fairly insightful look at the history of humans and how cultures got to their respective levels of advancement, but misses the most obvious reason for it throughout. Because of this, Diamond squanders a great opportunity.

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10 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars

much less than i expected

Based on its popularity and high reviews, I expected alot from this book. I was disappointed in that it was dully read, and the material was repetitive. There's a lot of space filled by lists, and I learned less than I hoped.

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8 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    out of 5 stars

great book

wished there was an unabridged version

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6 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars

Better as text

This is an excellent book, as is also Collapse by the same author. But it is a good example of a book that is, IMHO, unsuited for audiobook format.

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6 people found this helpful