Guns, Germs and Steel: 20th Anniversary Edition
(Paperback, New edition)
By Diamond, Jared
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This book answers the most obvious, the most important, yet the most difficult question about human history: why history unfolded so differently on different continents. Geography and biography, not race, moulded the contrasting fates of Europeans, Asians, Native Americans, sub-S...aharan Africans, and aboriginal Australians. An ambitious synthesis of history, biology, ecology and linguistics, Guns, Germs and Steel is one of the most important and humane works of popular science.
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| ISBN |
9780099302780 |
| Released NZ |
3 Jul 1998 |
| Publisher |
Vintage |
| Format |
Paperback, New edition |
| Availability |
999 In-stock at supplier; ships 7-14 working days
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Full details for this title
| Interest Age |
General Audience |
| Reading Age |
General Audience |
| Library of Congress |
World history, Economic geography, Economic history |
| NBS Text |
History: World & General |
| ONIX Text |
General/trade |
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Awards, Reviews & Star Ratings
| Awards |
Winner of Rhone Poulenc General Prize for Science Books 1998
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Winner of Rhone-Poulenc Science Books Prize 1998
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| NZ 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. |
| UK Review |
The fate of the native Americans was sealed in the late Pleistocene when their ancestors, spreading across the continent, wiped out the large land mammals. The lack of suitable creatures to domesticate at a later stage of cultural development left the people with no resistance to the kind of germs - flu, tuberculosis, measles - that humans originally picked up from cattle and pigs. It was germ warfare that enabled a few boatloads of Spaniards to subjugate the Americas. Geography, climate and microbiology are the mainstays of Diamond's overview of evolution, which sets out to demolish racism and to answer the interesting question, 'Why did wealth and power become distributed as they now are, rather than in some other way?' He makes the answer seem so obvious that you think you could have figured it out for yourself. The very broad sweep entails some omissions and generalizations, but the result is a solid basis for the study of history. (Kirkus UK) |
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Author's Bio
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 UntilYesterday. 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.
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