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Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human SocietiesAmazon Videos
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Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies Paperback – April 1, 1999

by Jared M. Diamond (Author)
#1 Best Seller in General Anthropology
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  1. Pulitzer PrizeWinner, 1998
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"Fascinating.... Lays a foundation for understanding human history."―Bill Gates

In this "artful, informative, and delightful" (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. Societies that had had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed religion --as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war --and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, the Rhone-Poulenc Prize, and the Commonwealth club of California's Gold Medal.
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  1. Book 1 of 3
    Civilizations Rise and Fall
  2. Print length
    480 pages
  3. Language
    English
  4. Publisher
    W. W. Norton & Company
  5. Publication date
    April 1, 1999
  6. Dimensions
    6.1 x 1.5 x 9.3 inches
  7. ISBN-10
    0393317552
  8. ISBN-13
    978-0393317558
  9. Lexile measure
    1440L
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  1. “History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.”
    Highlighted by 6,003 Kindle readers
  2. Those extinctions eliminated all the large wild animals that might otherwise have been candidates for domestication, and left native Australians and New Guineans with not a single native domestic animal.
    Highlighted by 3,516 Kindle readers
  3. Why did wealth and power become distributed as they now are, rather than in some other way?
    Highlighted by 3,399 Kindle readers
  4. Human history at last took off around 50,000 years ago, at the time of what I have termed our Great Leap Forward.
    Highlighted by 3,283 Kindle readers
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Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Most of this work deals with non-Europeans, but Diamond's thesis sheds light on why Western civilization became hegemonic: "History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves." Those who domesticated plants and animals early got a head start on developing writing, government, technology, weapons of war, and immunity to deadly germs. (LJ 2/15/97)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

“Artful, informative, and delightful.... There is nothing like a radically new angle of vision for bringing out unsuspected dimensions of a subject, and that is what Jared Diamond has done.”
- William H. McNeil, New York Review of Books

“An ambitious, highly important book.”
- James Shreeve, New York Times Book Review

“A book of remarkable scope, a history of the world in less than 500 pages which succeeds admirably, where so many others have failed, in analyzing some of the basic workings of culture process.... One of the most important and readable works on the human past published in recent years.”
- Colin Renfrew, Nature

“The scope and the explanatory power of this book are astounding.”
- The New Yorker

“No scientist brings more experience from the laboratory and field, none thinks more deeply about social issues or addresses them with greater clarity, than Jared Diamond as illustrated by Guns, Germs, and Steel. In this remarkably readable book he shows how history and biology can enrich one another to produce a deeper understanding of the human condition.”
- Edward O. Wilson, Pellegrino University Professor, Harvard University

“Serious, groundbreaking biological studies of human history only seem to come along once every generation or so. . . . Now [Guns, Germs, and Steel] must be added to their select number. . . . Diamond meshes technological mastery with historical sweep, anecdotal delight with broad conceptual vision, and command of sources with creative leaps. No finer work of its kind has been published this year, or for many past.”
- Martin Sieff, Washington Times

“[Diamond] is broadly erudite, writes in a style that pleasantly expresses scientific concepts in vernacular American English, and deals almost exclusively in questions that should interest everyone concerned about how humanity has developed. . . . [He] has done us all a great favor by supplying a rock-solid alternative to the racist answer. . . . A wonderfully interesting book.”
- Alfred W. Crosby, Los Angeles Times

“An epochal work. Diamond has written a summary of human history that can be accounted, for the time being, as Darwinian in its authority.”
- Thomas M. Disch, The New Leader

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Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond

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Jared Diamond is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, which was named one of TIME’s best non-fiction books of all time, the number one international bestseller Collapse and most recently The World Until Yesterday. A professor of geography at UCLA and noted polymath, Diamond’s work has been influential in the fields of anthropology, biology, ornithology, ecology and history, among others.