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Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies 20th Anniversary Edition
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Winner of the Pulitzer Prize • New York Times Bestseller • Over Two Million Copies Sold
“One of the most significant projects embarked upon by any intellectual of our generation” (Gregg Easterbrook, New York Times), Guns, Germs, and Steel presents a groundbreaking, unified narrative of human history.
Why did Eurasians conquer, displace, or decimate Native Americans, Australians, and Africans, instead of the reverse? In this “artful, informative, and delightful” (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, a classic of our time, evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond dismantles racist theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors actually responsible for its broadest patterns.
The story begins 13,000 years ago, when Stone Age hunter-gatherers constituted the entire human population. Around that time, the developmental paths of human societies on different continents began to diverge greatly. Early domestication of wild plants and animals in the Fertile Crescent, China, Mesoamerica, the Andes, and other areas gave peoples of those regions a head start at a new way of life. But the localized origins of farming and herding proved to be only part of the explanation for their differing fates. The unequal rates at which food production spread from those initial centers were influenced by other features of climate and geography, including the disparate sizes, locations, and even shapes of the continents. Only societies that moved away from the hunter-gatherer stage went on to develop writing, technology, government, and organized religions as well as deadly germs and potent weapons of war. It was those societies, adventuring on sea and land, that invaded others, decimating native inhabitants through slaughter and the spread of disease.
A major landmark in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way in which the modern world, and its inequalities, came to be.
- ISBN-100393354326
- ISBN-13978-0393354324
- Edition20th Anniversary
- PublisherW. W. Norton & Company
- Publication dateMarch 7, 2017
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions6.1 x 1.4 x 9.3 inches
- Print length528 pages
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Editorial Reviews
Review
― William H. McNeil, New York Review of Books
"An ambitious, highly important book."
― James Shreeve, New York Times Book Review
"A book of remarkable scope, a history of the world in less than 500 pages which succeeds admirably, where so many others have failed, in analyzing some of the basic workings of culture process.... One of the most important and readable works on the human past published in recent years."
― Colin Renfrew, Nature
"The scope and the explanatory power of this book are astounding."
― The New Yorker
"No scientist brings more experience from the laboratory and field, none thinks more deeply about social issues or addresses them with greater clarity, than Jared Diamond as illustrated by Guns, Germs, and Steel. In this remarkably readable book he shows how history and biology can enrich one another to produce a deeper understanding of the human condition."
― Edward O. Wilson, Pellegrino University Professor, Harvard University
"Serious, groundbreaking biological studies of human history only seem to come along once every generation or so. . . . Now [Guns, Germs, and Steel] must be added to their select number. . . . Diamond meshes technological mastery with historical sweep, anecdotal delight with broad conceptual vision, and command of sources with creative leaps. No finer work of its kind has been published this year, or for many past."
― Martin Sieff, Washington Times
"[Diamond] is broadly erudite, writes in a style that pleasantly expresses scientific concepts in vernacular American English, and deals almost exclusively in questions that should interest everyone concerned about how humanity has developed. . . . [He] has done us all a great favor by supplying a rock-solid alternative to the racist answer. . . . A wonderfully interesting book."
― Alfred W. Crosby, Los Angeles Times
"An epochal work. Diamond has written a summary of human history that can be accounted, for the time being, as Darwinian in its authority."
― Thomas M. Disch, The New Leader
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company; 20th Anniversary edition (March 7, 2017)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 528 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0393354326
- ISBN-13 : 978-0393354324
- Lexile measure : 1440L
- Item Weight : 1.35 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.1 x 1.4 x 9.3 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #6,226 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2 in Human Geography (Books)
- #3 in General Anthropology
- #19 in History of Civilization & Culture
- Customer Reviews:
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About the author
Jared Diamond is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, which was named one of TIME’s best non-fiction books of all time, the number one international bestseller Collapse and most recently The World Until Yesterday. A professor of geography at UCLA and noted polymath, Diamond’s work has been influential in the fields of anthropology, biology, ornithology, ecology and history, among others.
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At the time I thought that using Guns, Germs, and Steel as an educational tool would be a great idea. My dream of teaching history had never been realized and in 1997 seemed like it would never happen. However, history is full of strange things and in 2009 I got the chance to return to college and pick up my degrees. I began teaching American History in 2013 and was then asked to teach World Regional Geography for the Spring 2014 semester. They handed me a textbook and said, “Good luck.” As I drove back home I considered how I would teach this course and my mind recalled Jared Diamond and his Pulitzer Prize winning book. To make the story short, I built a course that used the textbook, Diamond’s book, and the National Geographic series based on the book.
Obviously I take what Diamond said in Guns, Germs, and Steel seriously. I think Diamond did some outstanding work in doing three decades of research and then writing a book which to me is resonates with readers. For many years the idea that Western Civilization was superior to any other form has been the dominant world view. Diamond rejects that completely by saying Western Civilization had advantages that others did not have due to geography, or literally where it was. When you stop and think about it, why were the Europeans so superior to others for so long? Was it their race, their ideals, or what? Diamond said it was because of where they started that they developed into the world spanning civilization we know.
What advantages did the Europeans have over others? They arrived with technology superior to all others, were better organized, and had the lethal gift of germs which in the Americas killed over half the population and was the biggest reason as to why the Europeans took those lands over. When Diamond explored the germ theory he realized that these germs came from contact with domesticated mammals such as horses, cows, pigs, chickens, sheep, and goats. These same mammals were what enabled Europeans to transport materials as well as have a convenient food supply and a power source such as horses pulling plows.
This idea works when you look at the Americas and Australia, but not when you look at Africa and Asia. The lethality of germs did not affect the people in those regions like it did the Americas. In fact, some of the diseases in Africa killed the Europeans and prevented them for exploiting Sub-Saharan Africa for centuries. Some of these germs are now known to have come from Asia as well along with domestic animals that came from there. Many of the larger mammals Europe had were also found in Asia. In fact, some of the technology such as gunpowder came from Asia as well. Diamond acknowledged this in his book and sought to explain why Europe was able to expand while Asia did not.
This is something I really stress in my class and it is something which the book and National Geographic series does not explore as deeply as it should. Diamond saw a decision made in the 15th century by a Chinese emperor as being the decisive event that altered human history. At that point China was the leading power in the world. It had a great navy, the largest country, gunpowder, advanced technology and far more people thanks to its agricultural practices than any other nation at that time. The decision by emperors in China’s Ming dynasty led to China losing its technological advantage over Europe although no one had any idea that this was happening. These decisions or orders are called Haijin.
Diamond did not explore this in any depth other than to point to it and say that China’s inward looking policies which had existed for centuries were the result of its location, its geography. Its singular form of government used Haijin to build up its power at the expense of expanding China’s culture and boundaries. There is a lot here to work with, but Diamond seems to casually bring it up in the book’s epilogue. Instead he focuses heavily on the Americas where his theory of environmental determinism is the strongest. I think he gets the theory right, but in the case of Asia he needed to go deeper.
Since Diamond is an ornithologist by education, and his world journey’s focused on New Guinea, I think his point of view was heavily influenced through his contact with hunter-gatherers. His theory is at its weakest in Asia and specifically China. That again reflects his preference for focusing on one type of people versus another. This does not mean his theory is wrong. It just needs expansion and I do not think Diamond will be doing that any time soon. His recent works have dealt with different ideas.
Even with this glaring problem, I think this book is outstanding. It does answer the question of why Western Civilization dominated the world for the most part. For my geography class it is a wonderful tool. I focus heavily on how man domesticated two grains from the Middle East, wheat and barley, and built Western Civilization upon them. Coupled with the domestication of large mammals, the forerunners of Western Civilization spread through Europe. Geography played a huge role in why it went west and why there are so many differences between East and West on a cultural level. It also explains why there are such huge differences between North Africa and the lands to the south of the Sahara.
The role of geography in shaping mankind is without a doubt the single underlying reason as to why history occurred like it did. This is really hard for students to understand because they seem to have been taught a much different concept prior to taking a geography course. Only by explaining the human-environment interaction do students begin to realize that geography caused man to make decisions which would reverberate for millennia. The people of the Middle East followed the Tigris and Euphrates rivers northwest into Anatolia and out of the desert. Man’s movement west, north, and south with the crops and animals of the Middle East were shaped by geographical barriers.
Diamond points out how man overcame these barriers over time. The civilization that was able to do so developed greater technologies than others. He points to both European and Chinese naval developments in this regard. China’s need to continue to build its naval forces was negligible due to a lack of naval enemies while in Europe those enemies were often themselves as nations competed for resources and trade. Since China controlled all of its trade which was mostly internal or land based, its need for a navy was reduced. Europe surged ahead while China languished.
In my classes I point to the barriers as we explore the world’s regions. I show how these barriers played such big roles. We play a board game by Avalon Hill that helps to illustrate this as well. Diamond’s book plays a big role in my class and so do his theories. I find it really helps students take the principles and ideas from the first part of the class and begin to apply them to the world regions we study. They are able to make the mental leap to the realization that the people of the world are different for many reasons, the foremost being the place in which they live more than anything else. It helps them to break down and discard the erroneous belief which many of them have regarding their place in the world. Using Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel I am able to use Transformative Learning Theory to overcome the disorientating dilemma they find themselves in at the beginning of class.
I could build a new class out of Diamond’s book that encompasses geography, history, and sociology if my school would let me. In fact, I could build two classes out of it. One would focus on why Western Civilization developed like it did and expanded to the Americas while the second one would focus on the development of Eastern Civilization and its failure to expand beyond Asia itself. While courses exist that dive into those ideas, they are built around history more than anything else. Few instructors use environmental determinism in explaining how early mankind developed in the places it did. The ultimate objectives of these courses would be why they developed like they did, not just their history.
Diamond has written several other books such as Collapse, The Third Chimpanzee, and The World Until Yesterday. He is Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has been awarded all kinds of prizes and awards for his research and work in multiple fields. I find it interesting that he began to study environmental history in his fifties which led to this book and many others. This to me is proof that you are not bound by formal rules regarding your education, but rather by using your interests coupled with the research capabilities your education has provided you new careers beckon. This book is a testament to following one’s interests and using one’s intellect. I highly recommend it to all readers. It is one of my favorite books and I have read through it multiple times.
Like Yali, the charismatic New Guinean local politician who quizzed the author 25 years before the book was written wanting to know why Europeans developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea which had little cargo of theirs, I bought this book in a bid to understand why Africa and its inhabitants developed at a much slower pace than other continents. Was it a matter of fate? Or was the politically incorrect charge that Africans are innately inferior to their fairer skinned counterparts somewhat justified ?
Jared Diamond makes a strong case for Geography's deterministic role in the evolution of societies. In other words, the rich societies of today simply won the geographical draft lottery (in terms of who got the largest continental pie/size, who got the most ideal conditions for farming, who got the most number of wild mammals suitable for domestication, and who got the widest variety of wild plant species ideal for agriculture) played over 13,000 years ago when modern man began to settle into village life in a few parts of the world. That decisive edge, reinforced over the last 13,000 years is what led to the emergence of an indomitable Europe that eventually came to lead the world due to its development of guns, germs, and steel.
According to the Author, Eurasia got decisively lucky in more ways than one:
The Late Pleistocene extinction decimated Eurasia's competitors by felling wild mammal species of most of North and South America and those of Africa that may have facilitated intensive farming instead of the hunter-gathering lifestyle which eventually became a big impediment to the development of rapidly evolving complex societies on those continents. Those extinctions left Eurasia with many more wild candidates for domestication than the Americas and Africas offered.
Agriculture and Continental Size were huge enablers. Eurasia is twice as large as the next largest continent, Africa, and had a wide extensive landmass of fertile soil amidst a variety of wild life that were easily domesticated for animal herding and valuable crops that facilitated the development of intensive farming techniques that helped serve denser populations and formed the basis for the formation of complex organized societies. Denser populations tend to rise only under conditions of food production, populations served by food surpluses from intensive farming techniques were more likely to have non-farming specialists, technocrats, warriors and bureaucrats. In contrast, poorer societies such as hunter-gatherers without such advantages remained as hunter-gatherers living in bands which were far from ideal to produce crop surpluses available for redistribution or storage, and hence could not support and feed non-hunting craft specialists, armies, bureaucrats, and chiefs to enable them evolve complex societies.
In turn, agriculture spawned lethal germs emanating from Eurasian's long advantageous exposure to domestic Animals which was as decisive in eliminating local populations in conquest as guns and steamboats were. As illustrated by the New world's conquest of almost 95 percent of the 20million American Indians; exposing the Indians to strains of germs the Indians had never been exposed to, and against which they therefore had neither immunity nor genetic resistance to.
The development of writing was another essential agent in assisting the conquests of Eurasian Societies: by fostering the development of maps that were beneficial to sailors exploring new lands to conquer, by providing a new way of communicating and (through preserved records) inspiring later generations to conquest, writing played a crucial role in the course of civilization but could not have been possible without food production. Writing emerged independently only in the Fertile Crescent, Mexico, and China because those were precisely the first areas were food production arose in their respective hemispheres.
I already told you that what brought me to this book was to understand why as an African, we've evolved rather slowly compared to everyone else? I got my money's worth somewhere in pg 399 where the author states that "the factor behind Africa's slower rate of Post Pleistocene development compared with Eurasia's is the different orientation of the main axes of thee continents. Like that of the Americas, Africa's major axis is north-south, whereas Eurasia's is east-west. As one moves along a north south axis, one traverses zones differing greatly in climate, habitat, rainfall, day length, and diseases of crops and livestock. Hence, crops and animals domesticated in one part of Africa had great difficulty in moving to other parts. In contrast crops and animals moved easily between Eurasian societies thousands of mile apart but at the same latitude and sharing similar climate and day lengths". In a nutshell, geography, and not biology, ultimately did us in.
I found this book a bit of a slog to get through due to the author's interdisciplinary approach ( history, archaeology, evolutionary biology, sociology, cultural anthropology etc) which mirrors his career trajectory so far. One of the few bones I have to pick with the book, as so many other reviewers have already mentioned, is its lack of sources. I also thought the author strove, quite frequently, a bit too hard for political correctness in for example, sounding a bit patronizing to the plight of poor societies like mine. I admit it may amount to career suicide for a tenured professor to have done otherwise; but to my mind any reader who can't handle a little intellectual honesty no matter how inconvenient isn't ready to address the fundamental questions about the human condition. For some reason, the kindle version I purchased didn't have images due to copyright issues. A bit of a setback because I didn't have any maps handy to make sense of the strange locations that pop up at various points in this read and no thanks, I like to read with an internet connection as far from me as possible. Then lastly, there was the glossy treatment of why different parts within Eurasia developed differently which he addresses scantly in a later edition of the book.
But GGS ultimately proved to be a great read for me, and highly recommended for anyone who wants a keener appreciation of the world we live in today. But be forewarned, you may never see the world the same way again which surely is a good thing.