Guns, Germs, and Steel

The Fates of Human Societies

De: Jared Diamond

Narrado por: Grover Gardner

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.

It was included in my subscription, so it didn’t cost me anything.

Read like a college lecture. Wasn’t that incite full. Didn’t learn anything new. Need three more words to be able to submit.

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.

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.

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.