Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared DiamondMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I’m not sure how much to trust this book. My evaluation of the actual claims ranged from “state of the art then but science has progressed now” to “totally reasonable (but don’t have independent verification)” to “… come on.”
That said, I thought it was great and would totally recommend it.
For one, I found it very readable with lots of fun anecdotes that are great for cocktail parties.
For another, I really liked his approach and just felt like he was asking the right questions, you know? with each new section and chapter I kept finding myself going “oh yeah, that’s exactly what I was wondering about.” He has maps and tables cataloguing the various independent inventions of agriculture and writing, which I just happened to be curious about and had been trying to haphazardly piece together in a google doc before I picked up this book. And reading his epilogue I felt sort of gleeful imagining how pissed off any historian reading it must be but also just kinda endorsed it.
I used to think of history and anthropology as sort of fundamentally non-scientific fields: just collecting anecdotes trying to tell you what happened, or what something is like. But I’ve gotten way more into them as I’ve realized their potential to actually explain things in a way that allows you to make falsifiable predictions. I don’t think that’s what most of those fields actually do, and it seems really hard compared to doing the same thing in science, but it totally seems like what they should be going for.
(Not that I think Diamond is a perfect practitioner of this or anything. The length at which he managed to discuss the domestication of plants and animals while totally refusing to consider the role that different environments and selective pressures might have played in the evolution of different human groups was honestly impressive.)
View all my reviews