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Book Review
Name
Institutional Affiliations
Date
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Diamond, J., 1997. Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York:
Norton Publishers.
Jared Diamond’s book is an ultimate evolutionary historic book that is highly
recommended to anyone with a strong desire to understand history. Apparently, the book is not
recommendable out of utter nothing, there are many good reasons. First, it’s a significant book in
the last three decades which won the 1998 Putlitzer Prize based on the fact that it represented the
one best application of natural science to human history. Diamond reframes a historical question
that he was asked by his friend Yali and offers new answers that makes it possible to understand
history in a better way. Yali’s question “Why it is that you white people developed so much cargo
and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?” (p.14) was later
reframed by Diamond to read “Why did wealth and power become distributed as they now are,
rather than in some other way?” (p. 15). In this book, Diamond consequently pushes the question
back to humans’ origin on the planet and then utilizes the same to motivate the reader to inquire
about the general questions about how human societies developed in such diverse ways, how
they shaped the places to suit their needs, and the times they performed these actions.
In pursuit of answering these questions, Diamond synthesizes a plethora of data ranging
from geology, to paleoecology, to linguistics, to geography, to traditional written and oral
histories of people around the world. Diamond draws an array of key points to arouse a kind of
feeling that enlightens the reader and stunningly comes obviously but unnoticed to reveal
different aspects of a problem. A great example is when he refers to the Eurasian region which is
greatly oriented to the east-west side while on the other hand, Africa and Americas have a north-
south orientation. In this contrasting example, Diamond shows how life in these continents has
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evolved creating a huge difference. Further, he proves how Eurasia has vast masses of roughly
similar climate where animals, plants, and humans easily migrated to. Conversely, Africa and
America offered a vast gamut of climate zones with different latitudes, mountains, and other
obstructions that hindered a smooth migration from the east to the west. The wide gamut of
physical barriers and climatic zones tremendously influenced the spread, domestication, and
evolution of animals and plants around the world.
When describing the methodology applied, Diamond prefers to be viewed as more of a
scientist rather than a historian (p. 17). He draws from geology and biology as well as
anthropology, archeology, genetics, epidemiology, and linguistics to derive a historic theory that
is based on massive scholarly works which are further complemented by exhaustive research.
Clearly, each chapter of the book is supported by a multitude of scholarly sources. Diamond
concludes that results of geographic location and environmental factors inevitability became the
determinants to the course of human history.
Diamond harnesses what seemingly can be interpreted as a simple geographic
observation which is seen to be the ultimate key factor in development of the theory that he uses
to explain the broad patterns present in the human history. Diamond’s theory presents a causation
that runs from the east to the west determining the kind of species that are more likely to spread.
In this, he indicates that the more a species spreads, the easier it becomes for such species to be
domesticated. Consequently, the more the animals and plant species that humans domesticate,
the more the surplus in food and food storage. As Diamond reveals, it is through the surplus in
food that it became easier for large, sedentary, and stratified communities to develop which
resultantly produced contiguous elements in the historical patterns, namely, technology and
powerful weapons (guns), heavy metals (steal), and infectious diseases (germs).
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Diamond tries to flesh out the broad outline that he offers using a wide gamut of this
broad outline with a host of observations and greater insights offering a range exciting
inquisitions that include what contributed to the spread of food production, why food production
spread at differing rates in different countries, and why humans did not tame most of the big wild
animal species. The background that Diamond sets allows him to embark on an extensive
analysis that helps us a reader to understand the relationship between germs, technology,
religion, writing, and government. Every chapter that Diamond writes is a gem of both scientific
writing style and logic.
Diamond’s book further comes into a full circle to address the initial question posed by
Yali addressing the history of New Guinea and Australia followed by a history of Austronesia,
East Asia, the Americas, Eurasia, and Africa, all of which are taken from a broader perspective
which are well developed early in the chapters. His analysis unveils the broad patterns that
underpin history of man and how wealth and power are distributed and how the patterns of the
environment in which they existed interacted and evolved alongside human evolvement. As
Diamond responded to Yali, he suggested that Europe and its descendants do not currently
possess more cargo since they have gained an inherent knowledge and smartness compared to
the African, New Guinean, and Australian Counterparts.
The factual truth is that Diamonds delivers a well-thought-out argument that fully
convinces the reader to understand the opposite that the hunter-gather people such as the New
Guineans and Africans were averagely smart compared to the civilized European counterparts.
However, Diamond further expounds that there are no standardized tests that would suit best as a
measure of these differences. The expansive examples of history are similarly illogical based on
the activities of a couple of key individuals as few history scholars have contended. On the other
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hand, Diamond’s provides examples attributable to the mishaps of biology and topography
cooperating with the social orders of human after some time.
While Diamond’s work is an exemplary compilation of historical events and a provision
of extensive and comprehensive answers to Yali’s question, there are some contentious
arguments that ought to be addressed. The most contentious part is seen in his conclusion where
he indicates that the precision of current discoveries and logical consistencies in prehistory and
archeology making it possible to foresee the human history future as a science. Here, we can find
a number of difficulties. Apparently, human history sciences should be based on a search for
processes, laws, and explanations founded on the agenda of a new archaeology such as that
pioneered by Binford in and other archeologists in the 1970s. Such an approach is currently
undermined by different theoretical approaches that refute the possibility of stressing the social,
cultural, and gendered landscape of archeological knowledge. Further, we can agree that
human’s history cannot be substantiated and equated to that of nebulas or glaciers and dinosaurs,
since the natural phenomena does not concisely provide a detectable human consciousness in
their actions nor do they create ample evidence on which we can fully understand.
Conclusively, when one looks at Diamond’s book, it’s a clear example of how history
should be written. Diamond’s book is extensive, comprehensive, and most importantly, self-
explanatory making it a perfect guide to how future policy should be written. Further, it offers a
room for unique personal contributions while at the same time putting these actions is the right
context. The ultimate role it performs is that of revealing and helping us understand the world we
live in and the place that we take at an essential level in designing and sustaining the human
presence on the world.
