Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared M. Diamond, ISBN-13: 978-0393317558
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- Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; First Edition (April 1, 1999)
- Language: English
- 480 pages
- ISBN-10: 0393317552
- ISBN-13: 978-0393317558
“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.
Table of Contents:
Cover
Title
Contents
Preface to the Paperback Edition: Why Is World History Like an Onion?
Prologue Yali’s Question
Part One: From Eden to Cajamarca
Chapter 1. Up to the Starting Line
Chapter 2. A Natural Experiment of History
Chapter 3. Collision at Cajamarca
Part Two: The Rise and Spread of Food Production
Chapter 4. Farmer Power
Chapter 5. History’s Haves and Have-nots
Chapter 6. To Farm or Not to Farm
Chapter 7. How to Make an Almond
Chapter 8. Apples or Indians
Chapter 9. Zebras, Unhappy Marriages, and the Anna Karenina Principle
Chapter 10. Spacious Skies and Tilted Axes
Part Three: From Food to Guns, Germs, and Steel
Chapter 11. Lethal Gift of Livestock
Chapter 12. Blueprints and Borrowed Letters
Chapter 13. Necessity’s Mother
Chapter 14. From Egalitarianism to Kleptocracy
Part Four: Around the World in Six Chapters
Chapter 15. Yali’s People
Chapter 16. How China Became Chinese
Chapter 17. Speedboat to Polynesia
Chapter 18. Hemispheres Colliding
Chapter 19. How Africa Became Black
Chapter 20. Who Are the Japanese?
Epilogue: The Future of Human History as a Science
2017 Afterword: Rich and Poor Countries in Light of Guns, Germs, and Steel
Acknowledgments
Further Readings
Credits
Illustrations
Index
Reading Group Guide
Praise for Guns, Germs, and Steel
Copyright
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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