Jared Diamond

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Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997)

May 19th, 1997

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"Diamond has written a book of remarkable scope ... one of the most important and readable works on the human past published in recent years."

In this "artful, informative, and delightful" book (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books), Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. Societies that had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed writing, technology, government, and organized 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

In 1998, it won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the Aventis Prize for Best Science Book. A documentary based on the book, and produced by the National Geographic Society, was broadcast on PBS in July 2005.

As a "bonus," here's an absorbing take on history itself, in this New York Review exchange between the two eminent historians, Jared Diamond and William McNeill, on the merits of their different contexts for analyzing historical trends over the long term:

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1997/06/26/guns-germs-and-steel/

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies  (1997)
Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary...

Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr was an American Reformed theologian, ethicist, commentator on politics and public affairs, and professor at Union Theological Seminary (NYC) for more than 30 years. Niebuhr was one of America's leading public intellectuals for several decades of the 20th century and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964.