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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.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Dr. Diamond. Now there’s a name begging to be assigned a character in a superhero movie. Jared Diamond might agree.
Guns, Germs, and Steel derives from a thesis Dr. Diamond has about how some societies were able to accumulate so much “cargo” compared to other peoples. He attempts to dissuade readers from ideas that individual or cultural superiority must be the basis of explanation.
This is a good topic but my interest in his argument fell off in proportion to the number of pages read. Not an obstacle, though. Dr. Diamond so often presented fun ideas and information that a thematic excuse to continue on wasn’t needed.
As one example of what I found fun: why zebras did not come to serve as the African horse.“Zebras have the unpleasant habit of biting a person and not letting go. They thereby injure even more American zookeepers each year than do tigers! Zebras are also virtually impossible to lasso with a rope—even for cowboys who win rodeo championships by lassoing horses—because of their unfailing ability to watch the rope noose fly toward them and then to duck their head out of the way.”
Pretty damn good, zebras. Born to be wild!
ALTHOUGH, I must point out, in the movie Hatari a zebra is lassoed by the character played by John Wayne. Now, no shame being lassoed by the Duke, of course. And it’s possible the movie exercised some sleight of hand to fool us. Maybe it was a zebra-striped horse (it really does look like a zebra though). Or maybe, just maybe, the “unfailing” zebras sometimes fail when chased a long distance by a bunch of people in a truck, a technique not available to ancient Africans. Is Dr. Diamond still interested? He should discuss this.
One annoyance was the book’s misleading title, which could better have been Germs! Germs! Germs! And Other Stuff. As a kid I didn’t like germs but I liked guns (the plastic toys) and I liked steel. The boy in me wanted to read about the stuff I’d liked. But those grim germs run rampant here, laying waste to the guns and the steel and their metaphorical counterparts.
Nor does it help that at times Dr. Diamond will talk so much about a single subject that the reader is apt to expire before finishing. His aim is to convince and if entertainment suffers from the effort, so be it.
The merit of the book is that the author gives well-articulated reasons in the effort to convince and he entertains often enough. Even when he fails and writes something dull or irritating, it’s easy to be forgiving because there will be something good coming up again. For example: “With the rise of chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago, people had to learn, for the first time in history, how to encounter strangers regularly without attempting to kill them.”
Let us bow to the chiefdoms! Without them, how could road trips be the attraction they are today?
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