Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. Jared Diamond. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. New York, NY. 1999, 1997.

Book review by Joel
I picked this one up about a year ago. It has taken me all this time to read it. I had to put it down and read other books just to take a rest from it. I like history books. This is more than a history book. It takes several areas of science and uses them to lead the reader on a grand tour of 13,000 years of human expansion and why we are where we are today.

It all started with a question from a local New Guinean politician named Yali. They were walking along the beach and he asked “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?” Cargo loosely translates as material goods. Twenty-five years later, he wrote this book to try to answer that question.

Jared’s talent was having experience in several sciences that all led him in the same direction, that geography and pure luck had more to do with Europeans dominating the planet than anything else. He used evolutionary biology, biogeography and molecular physiology and linguistics to trace where and how people moved and what happened when they did.

This was quite a journey through history. I thought some of the details in food and animal domestication were tedious, but I just don’t find those items interesting. If you ever wonder how we are where we are, this is a good book to start with. Just give it time.
Joel.