Rating: Not rated
Tags: History, Lang:en
Summary
"Fascinating.... Lays a foundation for understanding
human history."―Bill Gates
In this "artful, informative, and delightful" (William H.
McNeill,
New York Review of Books) book, Jared Diamond
convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors
shaped the modern world. Societies that had had a head start in
food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and
then developed 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. **