Guns, Germs, and Steel - Jared Diamond

    2003; 440 pages.  New Author? : Yes.  Full Title: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.  Genres : Ancient History; Human Geography; Non-Fiction.  Laurels: 1998 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction; 1997 Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science.  Overall Rating: 9½*/10.

 

    Outnumbered armies of Western European countries pulled off a pair of amazing victories in the 16^th century.  Cortez and a couple hundred conquistadors vanquished the powerful Aztec Empire in Mexico.  A few years later, Pizarro duplicated that feat against the Inca Empire in Peru.

 

    But both Spanish armies had some huge advantages.  Their soldiers had guns and horses, the Aztecs and Incas had none.  The Spanish also carried germs that decimated the Aztec and Incan populations with deadly plagues.  The Spaniards had steel swords, the Aztecs and Incas fought with stone hatchets.

 

    Those were all decisive edges for the European invaders.  But why hadn’t Mesoamerican civilizations developed similar weapons technologies?  And why weren’t the Aztec and Incan populace infested with their own sets of germs to which Europeans invaders would have no resistance?

 

    Jared Diamond examines the possible root causes of these technological and bacteriological factors of Guns, Germs, and Steel.  He comes to some surprising conclusions.

 

What’s To Like...

    After a brief Prologue wherein Jared Diamond recounts the incident that caused him to research this subject, Guns, Germs, and Steel is divided into five sections, namely:

    Part 1: From Eden to Cajamarca.  Notable conquests.

    Part 2: The Rise and Spread of Food Production.  Farming and animal domestication.

    Part 3: From Food to Guns, Germs, and Steel.  The evolution of armies.

    Part 4: Around the World in Five Chapters.  How each global landmass was populated.

    Epilogue: The Future of Human History as a Science.  Conclusions and Critiques.

 

    I was impressed by the author's meticulous research into the history of global conquests.  Regardless of geographic location, human civilization begins with the formation of hunter-gatherer bands, which still exist in a few, isolated areas of the world.  With some exceptions, those bands grow into tribes, which grow into chiefdoms, which grow into states.  The greater the population of the state, the more likely it will develop centralized government and armies.

 

    There are many factors that can hinder such a natural progression though, which are detailed in the text.  Not all crops are rich enough in proteins to feed sizable quantities of people.  Geographic boundaries, such as deserts, mountains, and oceans can also deter progress.  So does the absence of any sizable animals that are amenable to domestication.  There’s no use in inventing the wheel and chariots if you don’t have any beasts to pull them.

 

    I loved the way Jared Diamond presented the details of the evolution of Civilization.  How do you go about “inventing” writing?  Why did the Norsemen fail to found a permanent settlement in Canada after they discovered it?  And perhaps most curious of all, why did the clunky QWERTY keyboard become the worldwide standard for typing communications?

 

    There are at least three editions of Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997, 2003, 2007).  I happened to be reading the 2003 edition, which closes with the author responding to the various feedback—both positive and negative—that arose from people after reading the 1997 version.  Guns, Germs, and Steel won a Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction in 1998, which means it garnered a wide and diverse leadership.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.5*/5, based on 14,611 ratings and 3,190 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.04*/5, based on 469,675 ratings and 16,336 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    Inventing a writing system from scratch must have been incomparably more difficult than borrowing and adapting one.  The first scribes had to settle on basic principles that we now take for granted.  For example, they had to figure out how to decompose a continuous utterance into speech units, regardless of whether those units were taken as words, syllables, or phonemes.  They had to learn to recognize the same sound or speech unit through all our normal variations in speech volume, pitch, speed, emphasis, phrase grouping, and individual idiosyncrasies of pronunciation.  They had to decide that a writing system should ignore all of that variation.  They then had to devise ways to represent sounds by symbols.  (pg. 217)

 

    The striking differences between long-term histories of peoples of the different continents have been due not to innate differences in the peoples themselves but to differences in their environments.  I expect that if the populations of Aboriginal Australia and Eurasia could have been interchanged during the Late Pleistocene, the original Aboriginal Australians would now be the ones occupying most of the Americas and Australia, as well as Eurasia, while the Aboriginal Eurasians would be the ones now reduced to downtrodden fragments in Australia.  (pg. 405)

 

What caveman or cavewoman ever got the idea of “domesticating” a plant, and how was it accomplished?  (pg. 114)

    As would be expected in a work of scholarly non-fiction, there is almost no profanity in Guns, Germs, and Steel.  I noted just three instances, all of which involved the use of the word damn.  I didn’t catch a single typo, but perhaps these were caught and corrected in between the first and second editions.

 

    About the only quibble I can come up with is that the section on Agriculture was how many pages dealt with the way Food Production arose in various areas of the world.  Different crops work well or not-so-well in different climates.  Some were better at being hybridized than others; some contained oodles more protein than others.  Spending pages comparing corn to, say, sorghum got a bit tedious for me.

 

    But overall, Guns, Germs, and Steel thoroughly resonated with me.  I learned a lot from reading it, and since I muchly enjoy reading about Ancient History, this book was tailor-made for me.  It’s actually the first book in a trilogy; with the other two books titled Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed and Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis.  I think I need to go looking for these.

 

    9½ Stars.  One last thing.  Chapter 19, How Africa Became Black, deals with the history of the various empires, conquests, and peoples of that continent, particularly in the sub-Saharan and tropical areas.  I don’t recall ever reading such a detailed, informative account of this.  It was freakin’ awesome!