Have you read Diamond's novel 'Guns, Germs, and Steel' ?

Question

If so, what did you think? What is it about? And more importantly, should I read it? Thanks :-)

Answer 1

Explanatory for the European hegemony, but fails to explain the continuation of such hegemony in widely disparate areas of the world Europeans settled and why even today there is no real challenge to that hegemony.

The ascendancy of the Chinese, Indians, or some other population would be greater validation of Diamond's hypothesis

Answer 2

I agree with Bravo, there's a good reason it won the Pulitzer in its category.  It is not only a great read and quite enlightening in the way it pulls from such a multidiscipliary group of research to make its point but it shows the why of European global domination in an entirely nonbiased or racist framework.  Brilliant!

All that aside, one other thing that really scores it points when it comes to my being able to recommend it to anyone s that its written in a very non-dry, non-academic format that allows anyone to just pick it up and go WOW that makes a lot a sense and really get into it like its a novel as opposed to a nonfiction science text.

Do keep in mind though that it IS Diamond's theory and not necessarily hard proven fact etc.  You should consider it as a very plausible and well backed up with both research and logical argument based theory but still just his theory.  Many specialist in various fields still don't necessarily agree with every conclusion he has jumped to though.

That aside, I LOVED it.  

I found "Collapse", his next major work to be interesting too but not as easy to read.  (not from a comprehension stand point but because it just got boring in some parts and I had to push my self to keep going.  (Also very profound and mind opening though)

Answer 3

I loved it and gave it to some of my friends.  The name is an answer to why Europeans have been so much more successful than other groups.  It introduces some truly thought provoking reasons and little known facts.  The guy is a genious in how he breaks down the how technology formed and geographic reasons behind it.  I found the domestication of plants to be very enlightening also.  It changed the way I view the world.