Book #36: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond

I picked this book up from the bookshelf in the apartment we're renting for the summer. The guy who lives here has a surprisingly large collection of books, which made me happy when we moved in. (Actually, a lot of them are movie scripts, which helped us to conclude that he's probably an aspiring screenwriter--fitting for someone living in LA.) I saw this one and vaguely remembered hearing about it, and then saw the "Pulitzer Prize-winner!" on the front cover and decided to take the time to read it. And it DID take a lot of time--that's why it's been so long in between posting. It's not a quick read by any means, but it really was fascinating.

Diamond's overall thesis is that the way that our world is set up now--with European and Asian societies dominant over African, Polynesian, and other native American societies--is due to environmental considerations that affected how those countries developed. He's basically trying to write the anti-racist explanation for why white people are in charge, and arguing against all those people who say it's because Aboriginal Australians are just lesser forms of human beings.

For example, we can look at the conquest of the Americas by the Europeans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Diamond claims that there are a number of historical developments that supported Europe in being the overwhelming society instead of the overwhelmed. For example, Europe had much earlier domestication of plants with many more domesticable species, which in turn allows for larger populations and more complex societies. They also had thirteen of the fourteen major species of large domesticable animals on the Eurasian continent, which enabled them to develop better farming techniques and therefore better technology--and also to develop stronger immunity to the germs and epidemic diseases that wiped out most of the native Americans. Eurasia is also a mostly east-west continent, which made for easier transport and dispersion of food and trade between groups. So Eurasia developed more quickly in those elements, developing more complex societies with technology and literacy. And the Americas are exactly the opposite. So it's no wonder that they were DESTROYED when the Europeans came in (scientists estimate that there were MILLIONS of native Americans in the Americas before the Europeans came over, and over 95% of them were killed by the epidemic diseases brought with the Europeans. CRAZY.) There's way more I could include here, but that's a small summary of the whole book.

Diamond writes in a VERY scientific way, very methodically--he always sets up lists that he goes through in full throughout each chapter, which really appealed to me as an obsessive list-user. It did get a little repetitive by the end, but I don't think that was his fault, because he had to keep referring back to all the proofs and explanations he offered earlier in the book as he went through the case studies he gives at the end. All in all, it was a really interesting book that I would definitely recommend to anyone interested in world history.