The World until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

Jared Diamond is patient with the non-academic reader. He presents his intriguing ideas in story form with a minimum of statistics and dry facts. He shares his insights from a long career of living among primitive people in several areas -- mostly Papua New Guinea. He tells about the similarities and differences of their lives compared to ours. Then he asks, "Could they have been onto something that we could revisit in our own lives?" It is a good question and one that stays with the reader long after the book is finished.

One example: in primitive groups, children spend a lot of time in age-mixed groups which allows the younger kids to learn from the older ones and the older ones to feel pride and accomplishment when they teach the younger ones. In our culture, children are separated into age-specific groups and taught together by an adult. The age segregation continues outside school in team sports and play dates. With small families, some children do not have experience with children of other ages -- often until they become parents themselves. As I was reading this, my 10-year-old grandson was playing with his 1-year-old cousin, showing her new ways to play with her "baby" toys. She was delighted with his attention and soon turned her push-car upside down as he had done, spinning the wheels with her hands. Later, the 10-year-old went to a museum with his 20-year-old cousin to see dinosaurs. The 20-year-old grew up in this town and had visited the museum many times, so he was an expert in the eyes of the 10-year-old and he seemed to enjoy the adulation.

This book made me think about the "advances" we have made in our culture and question it. Most of it has been good (sanitation, public health, medical care) but some of the old ways have merit and deserve examination. After all, they were in practice until "just yesterday" and helped us survive and evolve to what we are today.

I'm a great fan of Diamond and I enjoyed this book a lot and learned from it. The topic is one I've thought of often-- the world has recently changed so much (cell phones, Internet, pavement, airplanes, cars, movies, television, immense variety of food, medicine) but people haven't changed. Our basic needs are the same and it's not clear how well modern society fulfills some of them even while other needs are satisfied beyond the dreams of our ancestors. The two things that weren't excellent were (a) the section on diet. This is a topic that has been written about extensively all over the place so there wasn't anything new as there was in other sections and (b) the narrator was very good but not, I felt, a good match to the book, since he sounded like a young man (30s or 40s), yet the book was written in the first person by Diamond who mentioned repeatedly that he's 75 years old. I think a narrator with an older but still energetic sound would have fit better. Those minor points aside, I loved the book and recommend it highly.

Yes. This book holds your ear. It is not hard to follow from chapter to chapter. This is Cultural Anthropology at its contemporary best.

No. But this book will make me look for his other works.

Yes. This book holds your attention

Refreshing. A book with a I.Q.

Though an excellent concept, The World until Yesterday drones on, wallowing in poor analogies and disjointed stories. Not enough insight and "big picture" ideas, difficulty tying it all together.

I love Jared Diamond. I enjoy how he sees the world, how he explains complex material and makes it understandable. He makes a great deal of sense. This one is about tradition living as exemplified primarily by villages in Papua New Guinea (with scattered examples elsewhere) compared to the modern western world. While Diamond clearly admires some aspects of the traditional cultures he has experience over the decades, this is no sonnet to the noble savage. He brings out the infanticide and elder murder as easily as the community relationships and natural multi-lingualism. Highly entertaining, it will seep into your sub-consciousness and influence how you think about a great many things, and help you appreciate the glorious state that allows us to walk around and not kill or be killed by the strangers that walk by us in the mall. (Read the book; you'll get it.)