Guns, Germs, and Steel

The Fates of Human Societies

By: Jared Diamond

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Length: 5 hrs and 58 mins

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)

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.

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.

SoSo

This book presents the theory that geography and distribution of resources, not genetics, is responsible for the vast disparity in wealth that we see today.

The author presents his argument thoroughly and I certainly learned a few things from this book.

Unfortunately, I also found it quite tedious in parts; I remember a seemingly endless recitation of different crops and their development in different parts of the world. By 3/4 of the way through I was contemplating skipping the rest.

Perhaps I lack sufficient interest in this topic. I nonetheless will probably try his other book (about why societies fail IIRC) when it comes out on Audible.