There probably isn’t a correct answer to this, but I would like to begin our plunge into this work by explaining its actual purpose, at least the way it seemed to me when I read it.Ĭonsidering the subject matter, Guns, Germs and Steel is fairly short, with the hardcover edition having about five hundred pages of content.
With such an extensive book sweeping through so many topics at once, it’s a little difficult to decide where to start, what one ought to focus on first. Ultimately, he seeks to answer the laughably basic and yet deceivingly complex question: why did certain people end up with so much more than others? The Big Picture with Guns, Germs and Steel
Diamond goes to great lengths to illustrating the far-reaching and often unintended consequences of the roles they end up playing.Īfter establishing the base causes for the moulding of human history (there are others in addition to the ones mentioned above), he then explores various societies, individuals and events to show how his model applies and explains them.
A sizable portion of the book is dedicated to the tremendous importance of geographical and environmental factors, as well as agriculture and livestock-related techniques. One by one, he examines the various factors which he has identified as the principal ones which allowed certain societies to rise and others to fall over time. Without taking too long on this section, he then moves to approximately 11,000 BC, where he begins a more in-depth exploration of the factors which forced the story of humanity down a certain path. What’s more, he engages himself to lay this explanation out in a way any layman could understand.Īs such, he begins his grandiose quest by taking us back before the end of the last ice age, giving a sweeping overview of how evolution shaped humans for millions of years while they lived and developed in Africa. Without making any understatements, the task Diamond took upon himself is nothing if not enormous, attempting to provide a comprehensive overview and explanation which, theoretically, ought to be applicable to any point in human history. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book titled Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond asks and attempts to answer the question of why humanity developed and shaped itself the way it did. We’ve come to accept it as a given, as if no other course could have potentially been followed. Jared Diamond Attempts to Understand Humansįamiliarity with human history greatly varies from one individual to the next, but I think it’s safe to say the majority of people have similar views of its overarching currents and major key points.
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