Guns, Germs and Steel

The Fate of Human Societies

By: Jared Diamond

Narrated by: Doug Ordunio

Length: 16 hrs and 20 mins

Publisher's summary

Pulitzer Prize, General Nonfiction, 1998

Guns, Germs and Steel examines the rise of civilization and the issues its development has raised throughout history.

Having done field work in New Guinea for more than 30 years, Jared Diamond presents the geographical and ecological factors that have shaped the modern world. From the viewpoint of an evolutionary biologist, he highlights the broadest movements both literal and conceptual on every continent since the Ice Age, and examines societal advances such as writing, religion, government, and technology. Diamond also dissects racial theories of global history, and the resulting work—Guns, Germs and Steel—is a major contribution to our understanding the evolution of human societies.

©1997 Jared Diamond (P)2011 Random House

Knowledge is Power!

Loved this book, from cover to cover. The history of humans as a species has always fascinated me. This book has answered questions I've held for many years. I am so glad I decided to embark on the journey set forth by Jared Diamond 10 out of 10

interesting perspective

very well researched and thought out story of world history. The story of how small changes millennial ago created major changes in the modern world.

Best book on history ever

Learn why things are the way they are. Why races aren't superior to one another. And how history is almost a science.

Some parts are boring, but still fascinating

In short, it tries to answer the question of why European culture and not culture from other parts of the world is dominating the world today.

The book is fascinating, contains a lot of interesting facts and enlightens the reader with some of the great theories and explanations in linguistics, evolution, biology, anthropology and history. It may not be very detailed in answering certain questions, but it's a great starting point to investigate the subject you are interested in further. As other reviewers noted, it contains a boring part on botany which is really exhausting to listen to, but other than that it was interesting.

The narrator was not perfect, chewing some words. Also the quality of the recording is not perfect with some white noise, but after a while you stop noticing that.

great journey of human societies

"Why you white people brought so much of cargo, where we New Guinean have so little of them?"

A simple innocent question by Yali started the author's journey from the end of last ice age about 13,000 years ago to the modern era of guns, germs and steel. That fascinating journey answered many of my questions, or made honest attempt with environmental, historical, archeological and socio cultural evidences. Like Yali, the question of european colonization and supremacy over other societies were bugging me for years. While I was about to be falling pray to racial and gene diversity theory on modern human, I got a whole new perspective from this book. The author observed, even though the migration started across continents long before the last ice age, how the Sumers got the environmental and geographic advantages in fertile crescent to start early domestication of plants and mammals. The food production slowly replaced hunter-gatherer nomadic lifestyle to dense community and changed egalitarian societies to stratified ones by making scribes, priests and army . The advantage of food producing societies over foraging societies helped them to conquer either by extermination or by enslaving. The dense community and animal domestication also bought lethal germs which also played a huge role in shaping the humanity. The author also elaborated how other major milestones like writing and then inventions played key roles to catalyze skewed growth of eurasian continent due to idea diffusion and competing societies.

The book also leaves may questions to be answered. One such key question, why colonization of new world started from western Europe lately, while China was enjoying more unified society, huge costal area and ship building and voyaging technologies. Another question was, even if early modern civilization started in fertile crescent, why it became arid over a period of time and civilization shifted more western?

Lastly, after reading this book, I'm fully convinced that history is macro science. The detailed observation of changing world gives us a huge perspective to the future, the future of humanity. Overall, a must read for one in the quest of "who am i".

Enlightening Review

I waited way too long to read this book, but I am very glad that I did finally. A true masterpiece of knowledge and views.

very informative

lots of great historical context and information. As a microbiologist with interests in botany I only had 2 sides of this. this book opened up a couple more views

Good Book

Struggled to finish it. There's a lot of facts to process and that's considering that this book is just a recap of human history.

I could not listen to this book.

The narrator is too monotonous... or had a pattern to his voice that made it very difficult to hear for a long period of time. I ended up buying the book and putting it in the pile of books I'll read someday when I have tons of time to just sit around. :-)

De lo más interesante que he leído en los últimos años!

Si te gusta entender mas del mundo y de cómo llegamos a estar como estamos hoy, este libro es de lectura obligatoria. Muy bueno!