Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond (Book Review Sample)

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“Guns, Germs, and Steel” by Jared Diamond
The key theme of Jared Diamond’s book “Guns, Germs, and Steel” is the history of societies and cultures as well as their place in that history. In 1998, it won the prize for a nonfiction book and became the national best seller that year. Diamond caught the attention of the public by his book with a fascinating account of more than 13000 years of human evolution and development. He contends that the lapses in power and technology in the human societies originated from differentiated environments. The author argues that while cultural or genetic make-up has favored Eurasians regarding resistance to endemic diseases and development of writing earlier than on the other continents, these advantages occurred due to the impact of geography on civilizations and values; therefore, they are not inherited by the Eurasian genomes (Diamond 16).
Diamond’s thesis is that geography and the environment are important factors in shaping the world into a better place. He expounds on this phenomenon during his field research in Guinea. While he was there, one of his New Guinean friends asked him one question. In the book, he tries to answer Yali’s question “Why did the white people develop so many guns and brought it to Guinea while the blacks had little cargo of their own?”. The cargo referred to in this text is technology. The technological tools and machinery include computers, cell phones, Internet, and simple tools such as the axes and accessories. At that time, Africans were using stone tools; Diamond tries to analyze the factors that lead to the between one culture and another ADDIN CSL_CITATION { "citationItems" : [ { "id" : "ITEM-1", "itemData" : { "DOI" : "10.1046/j.1467-8330.2003.00352.x", "ISSN" : "0066-4812", "abstract" : "Guns, Germs, and Steel (GGS) is an astonishing book. In eloquent prose, Jared Diamond maps the origins of global inequality, which, he argues, reflect when different regions first acquired disease immunity, guns, and steel. But these are only proximate causes. Geography is the ultimate reason why some regions developed faster and more fully than others.", "author" : [ { "dropping-particle" : "", "family" : "Diamond", "given" : "Jared", "non-dropping-particle" : "", "parse-names" : false, "suffix" : "" }, { "dropping-particle" : "", "family" : "Merrett", "given" : "Christopher D", "non-dropping-particle" : "", "parse-names" : false, "suffix" : "" } ], "container-title" : "Antipode", "id" : "ITEM-1", "issued" : { "date-parts" : [ [ "2003" ] ] }, "page" : "801-806", "title" : "Debating Destiny: Nihilism or Hope in Guns, Germs, and Steel ?", "type" : "article-journal", "volume" : "35" }, "uris" : [ "/documents/?uuid=b0e72b0c-fa48-46cc-b14a-c60bd13fc621", "/documents/?uuid=35b0c6c8-36ae-4526-8a23-5cc1c6161ca2" ] } ], "mendeley" : { "manualFormatting" : "(Diamond and Merrett, 801)", "previouslyFormattedCitation" : "(Diamond and Merrett)" }, "properties" : { "noteIndex" : 0 }, "schema" : "https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json" }(Diamond and Merrett 801).
To find the answer, Diamond examines millions of years of history mapping the migration of humans from Africa to Eurasia, from Asia to Pacific Ocean islands as well as from Serbia to America. He tries to follow humans as they evolved biologically and comes up with a conclusion based on a specific representation of the society. To expound on the differences that existed between the developing countries, he emphasizes the effects of technology, food production, religion, and government. He further demonstrates his opinion as to why the differences among the various cultures occurred. He states that geography is the main reason leading to the cultural disparities as opposed to biology or race as other scientist viewed it ADDIN CSL_CITATION { "citationItems" : [ { "id" : "ITEM-1", "itemData" : { "DOI" : "10.2307/1313576", "ISBN" : "0393061310", "ISSN" : "00063568", "PMID" : "35792200", "abstract" : "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.", "author" : [ { "dropping-particle" : "", "family" : "Costanza", "given" : "Robert", "non-dropping-particle" : "", "parse-names" : false, "suffix" : "" }, { "dropping-particle" : "", "family" : "Diamond", "given" : "Jared", "non-dropping-particle" : "", "parse-names" : false, "suffix" : "" } ], "container-title" : "BioScience", "id" : "ITEM-1", "issued" : { "date-parts" : [ [ "1999" ] ] }, "page" : "828", "title" : "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies", "type" : "article", "volume" : "49" }, "uris" : [ "/documents/?uuid=3f10b703-6c14-40ef-8ab1-0f84b5a8b3da", "/documents/?uuid=027951f5-7e5c-4621-ac2a-041b7f3797d0" ] } ], "mendeley" : { "manualFormatting" : "(Costanza and Diamond, 828)", "previouslyFormattedCitation" : "(Costanza and Diamond)" }, "properties" : { "noteIndex" : 0 }, "schema" : "https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json" }(Costanza and Diamond 828).
To stress his point, Diamond recounts his talk with Yali, a New Guinean politician, who was concerned about how Europe managed to produce goods for export while they could not. He also notes that the same question can be applied to other continents. Eurasia produced people who dominated the world in wealth and power even after the other people had regained their independence from their colonizers. Such countries, despite their numerous resources, still lag behind the Eurasians in wealth and power being subdued and devastated (Diamond 17).
The first chapters that focus on food production are the most interesting in the book to read. However, it is not obvious. I was a little bit reluctant to pay much attention to reading the chapters; however, the domestication of wheat and Diamond’s exploration of natural selection and human interventions is surprisingly compelling. He further discusses more wildlife and factors that made large mammals more susceptible to domestication than others, for example, comparing sheep with lion. The distribution of domestic animals is the most important revelation found in the book ADDIN CSL_CITATION { "citationItems" : [ { "id" : "ITEM-1", "itemData" : { "DOI" : "10.1046/j.1467-8330.2003.00352.x", "ISSN" : "0066-4812", "abstract" : "Guns, Germs, and Steel (GGS) is an astonishing book. In eloquent prose, Jared Diamond maps the origins of global inequality, which, he argues, reflect when different regions first acquired disease immunity, guns, and steel. But these are only proximate causes. Geography is the ultimate reason why some regions developed faster and more fully than others.", "author" : [ { "dropping-particle" : "", "family" : "Diamond", "given" : "Jared", "non-dropping-particle" : "", "parse-names" : false, "suffix" : "" }, { "dropping-particle" : "", "family" : "Merrett", "given" : "Christopher D", "non-dropping-particle" : "", "parse-names" : false, "suffix" : "" } ], "container-title" : "Antipode", "id" : "ITEM-1", "issued" : { "date-parts" : [ [ "2003" ] ] }, "page" : "801-806", "title" : "Debating Destiny: Nihilism or Hope in Guns, Germs, and Steel ?", "type" : "article-journal", "volume" : "35" }, "uris" : [ "/documents/?uuid=35b0c6c8-36ae-4526-8a23-5cc1c6161ca2" ] } ], "mendeley" : { "manualFormatting" : "(Diamond and Merrett,803)", "previouslyFormattedCitation" : "(Diamond and Merrett)" }, "properties" : { "noteIndex" : 0 }, "schema" : "https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json" }(Diamond and Merrett 803).
Jared Diamond’s presentation of a nice coherent case study of the western civilization is rich enough because of abundance and adequacy of food crops and domestic animals. The Africans had enough food to eat and animals which led to their civilization and modernization. The geography also facilitated the migration and the spread of these skills and people across the communities. Diamond regarded the effects of geography and natural biology as important to the growth and development of civilization among the people (Diamond 17).
The title of the book refers to the means by which agricultural societies conquered people from other continents and dominated them despite being out-numbered. The guns were superior weapons, hence providing military superiority. The Eurasian diseases (germs) killed those who had no immunity hence made it easy to control others, and steel provided a reliable mode of transport that led to imperialism. The best examples, which Diamond gives of this phenomenon, lay in the contest between Eurasia and the Americans. Diamond puts into consideration the tremendous contacts between Europe and China (Diamond 16). He states that these contacts were not all one way. Though the evidence is available from the times of early food production, Diamond states that successive millennia would see innovations in the east and west countries. Native Americans failed to engage in any analogous cultural and technological exchange even with the civilization of Mesoamerica and Peru; thus, they were unable to link up to one of the domestic animals ADDIN CSL_CITATI...