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Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies | 
| Author: Jared Diamond
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy Used: $10.48
You Save: $14.47 (58%)
Rating:  1082 reviews
Sales Rank: 669
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 512
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.1
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.7
ISBN: 0393061310
Dewey Decimal Number: 303.4
EAN: 9780393061314
ASIN: 0393061310
Publication Date: July 11, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: Inventory subject to prior sale. Used items have varying degrees of wear, highlighting, etc. and may not include supplements such as infotrac or other web access codes. Expedited orders cannot be sent to PO Box. Sorry, not able to ship to APO, FPO, Alaska, and Hawaii.
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com 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.
Product Description
With a new chapter. The phenomenal bestseller—over 1.5 million copies sold—is now a major PBS special. 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. 32 illustrations.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 1077 more reviews...
 No Book is More Important January 5, 2009
Zachary J. Wimmer
With over 1,000 reviews on Amazon it is quite unlikely you will read anything different in my review than all the other five star reviews. I must say that Jared Diamond has written an extraordinary book. The question he tackles with GGS is, "Why and how did wealth and power develop in some areas and not in others."
Diamond concludes that wealth and power can be contributed to several factors: an East/West axis, domesticable plants and animals, this results in food surpluses and thus sedentary lifestyles which allow for specialization. Also, the domesticated large animals transfer diseases to a population, but due the sheer size of the population over time they will be able to develop immunity. Specialization then produces technology, writing, and political organization. In all this is why Eurasia was the region to conquer the Americas, Australia, etc.
It takes no prior knowledge to understand anything in this book. Diamond informs the reader on everything he/she will need to know to understand GGS. As my title states, no book is more important than this one to understand how and why different countries developed guns, germs, and steel and other countries did not.
European Advantages December 14, 2008
Jim (Ohio)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Professor Diamond takes up a very difficult question that spans centuries. He sets out to figure out why the Europeans were able to succeed not only in their enviornment, but control throughout the world.
Geography is something Diamond finds as a major factor. Geographic luck was able to determine that type of crops, and the conditions.
Diamond concludes that once the societies discovered how to produce enough food for themselves, then some of the other citizens were able to use their free time to advance other areas. This created specialists which resulted in the innovations of Guns and Steel. The germ advantage was because the Europeans lived with pigs.
Domestic animals (Diamond finds 14 thorughout history) most of them centered in Europe gave the major advantage against disease.
Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel is an outstanding and interesting book to read.
Why some societies advance faster than others. December 14, 2008
chris faulkner (Granger, Indiana)
It comes down to farming. Whoever farms first wins. Whichever society can not have to worry about what they are going to eat every day has the time to devote to innovation. The author's theory on a society's proximity to the equator does have some merit. I would have liked to have seen more discussion on how a society can hold itself back, such as Chinese rulers who burned their ships and stopped trade.
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