Guns, Germs and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years - Softcover

9780099302780: Guns, Germs and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years
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"Fascinating.... Lays a foundation for understanding human history."―Bill Gates

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Guns, Germs, and Steel is a brilliant work answering the question of why the peoples of certain continents succeeded in invading other continents and conquering or displacing their peoples. This edition includes a new chapter on Japan and all-new illustrations drawn from the television series. Until around 11,000 BC, all peoples were still Stone Age hunter/gatherers. At that point, a great divide occurred in the rates that human societies evolved. In Eurasia, parts of the Americas, and Africa, farming became the prevailing mode of existence when indigenous wild plants and animals were domesticated by prehistoric planters and herders. As Jared Diamond vividly reveals, the very people who gained a head start in producing food would collide with preliterate cultures, shaping the modern world through conquest, displacement, and genocide.The paths that lead from scattered centers of food to broad bands of settlement had a great deal to do with climate and geography. But how did differences in societies arise? Why weren't native Australians, Americans, or Africans the ones to colonize Europe? Diamond dismantles pernicious racial theories tracing societal differences to biological differences. He assembles convincing evidence linking germs to domestication of animals, germs that Eurasians then spread in epidemic proportions in their voyages of discovery. In its sweep, Guns, Germs and Steel encompasses the rise of agriculture, technology, writing, government, and religion, providing a unifying theory of human history as intriguing as the histories of dinosaurs and glaciers. 32 illustrations

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Review:
Explaining what William McNeill called The Rise of the West has become the central problem in the study of global history. In Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond presents the biologist's answer: geography, demography, and ecological happenstance. Diamond evenhandedly reviews human history on every continent since the Ice Age at a rate that emphasizes only the broadest movements of peoples and ideas. Yet his survey is binocular: one eye has the rather distant vision of the evolutionary biologist, while the other eye--and his heart--belongs to the people of New Guinea, where he has done field work for more than 30 years.
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  • PublisherVintage
  • Publication date1998
  • ISBN 10 0099302780
  • ISBN 13 9780099302780
  • BindingPaperback
  • Number of pages480
  • Rating

Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

9780393354324: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

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Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017
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  • 9781784873639: Guns Germs & Steel

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Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. 'A book of big questions, and big answers' Yuval Noah Harari, bestselling author of SapiensA short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years; now with a new afterword to mark the 20th anniversary of publication'A book of big questions, and big answers' Yuval Noah Harari, bestselling author of SapiensWhy has human history unfolded so differently across the globe? And what can it teach us about our current crisis?Jared Diamond puts the case that geography and biogeography, not race, moulded the contrasting fates of Europeans, Asians, Native Americans, sub-Saharan Africans, and aboriginal Australians.An ambitious synthesis of history, biology, ecology and linguistics, Guns, Germs and Steel is a ground-breaking and humane work of popular science that can provide expert insight into our modern world.**WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE****Over One Million Copies Sold** 'A book of big questions, and big answers' Yuval Noah Harari, bestselling author of Sapiens Why has human history unfolded so differently across the globe? Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9780099302780

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