واحد من أهم و اعظم الكتب التي مرت معي طوال مسيرتي بعالم الكتب والقراءة
يعالج بشكل اساسي السبب الذي يجعل بعض الأقوام والحضارات متفوقة على غيرها
لماذا تفوقت المجتمعات الآسيوية والشرق الاوسطية في حقب التاريخ القديم.. ولماذا تفوقت اوربا في آخر 500 سنة

لا اريد ان اكتب اي مراجعة او تلخيص
فهذا الكتاب يقرأ مرة ومرتين وثلاثة...

In his book "Guns, Germs, and Steel," Jared Diamond provided a STRANGE TYPE OF BIBLIOGRAPHY. There are no references to research sources in the body of the text to support whatever statements the author makes.

Instead, there is a section titled "Further Readings". There are some references in this section, but there are no direct matches between those works and statements in the text. A lack of references makes this text more readable for casual readers, and that helps the book's sales.

However, at the same time, any statements in the text effectively become just opinions of the book's author without support from other researchers. With that, the information in the book becomes less credible, and respectfully, the hype about the book becomes overrated.

In the ~mid 16th century the Spanish conquistador Pizarro captured the Incan Emperor Atahualpa despite being outnumbered a few hundred to few tens of thousands. Why didn’t Atauhalpa’s warriors instead land in Spain and capture King Charles I? More generally, why did Europeans conquer the world? And what factors govern the broad trends of societies in the history of our species? Are they predominantly biological? cultural? geographical? is it all luck and chaos?

Guns, Germs, and Steel seeks to answer these questions. The central thesis is that if you carefully trace the major factors they will lead you to geography. Do you play Civilization? Of course you do. The book argues that the winner of the game of Civilization has very little to do with the players and almost everything to do with the distribution of resources near the starting locations of different civs. And if there are any biological factors (e.g. civ-specific bonuses), they are negligible in the scheme of things (as it is in Civ games as well). The Europeans, for example, happened to spawn next to a lot of bonus tiles for a wide variety of nutritious plants giving +10 food, and also bonus tiles for several domesticable animals, giving +5 food and +5 production. Any civ player can tell you that if your population grows faster and the cities become bigger and denser you will get lots of nice bonuses: specialist civilians, social stratification, faster research, more culture, etc. Over several hundred years these bonuses add up and the next thing you know you're showing up with 10 +28 attack Musketeers in a territory full of gold tiles defended by a +8 attack Aztec warrior. Unmodeled by Civilization games, you also enjoy carrying more germs that you’re also resistant to, and it's cheaper to establish trade routes west-east instead of south-north due to climates (convenient for Eurasia, not so much for America).

These are very important questions and it’s all great to know and contemplate, but dammit is it painful - the book feels like eating your vegetables. Be prepared to hear (in excruciating detail) about different protein:carb:fat ratios of dozens of plants species you’ve never heard of. Be prepared to learn much more than you ever wanted about all possible candidate animals for domestication. Jared in fact manages to enumerate them all. These sections are definitely interesting and you can’t help but admire the thoroughness and attention to detail here, but it’s exhausting.

There are a few more things that can be critiqued:
- the hypocrisy in the dubious claim that Papa New Guineans are smarter than whites is jarring, considering that the whole point of the book is to discredit biological determinism.
- the book is almost certainly sometimes guilty of post-hoc reasoning, but admittedly Jared is aware of this criticism and tries hard to avoid it.
- the pacing is slightly off: there are hundreds of pages devoted to plant seeds, and only dozens of pages devoted to much more interesting patterns of development (especially in the last chapter).

I can’t decide if I should recommend this book. I personally liked it (i.e. 3/5 on Goodreads scale). It was a significant undertaking and I feel that I’ve gained quite a bit of insight into the development of societies in the history of our species, but… at what cost? **shudders**.

GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL: THE FATES OF HUMAN SOCIETIES BY JARED DIAMOND: This is one of those books that takes you a while to read -- it's pretty heavy non-fiction -- and yet at the end of it, you feel like Hippocrates, a Muslim scientist, or Leonardo Da Vinci must have felt at the realization of a great discovery. The Eureka! moment. This book is kind of like the movie Hotel Rwanda: the movie was life-altering for me, and just made every other movie that came out that year seem tawdry and unimportant; it was one of those movies that everyone should see (especially Americans and Western Europeans) just to understand the world and its history better. Guns, Germs, and Steel is one of those books that everyone should read to better comprehend their existence at this specific moment in time.

The premise of the book is revealed in the prologue in a conversation between the author and a New Guinea native who lives his very simple life in Stone Age conditions. The thesis that arises in their conversation is what specific events led to the fact that Europeans were the ones to reach New Guinea and interact with its people, and why it wasn't the New Guinea people to develop the technology and abilities to travel the world and make first contact with the Europeans.

With the concept in place, Diamond sets about doing this in his conversational and, quite frankly, mind-blowing and ingenious way. As a professor, with studies in anthropology and biology, he has an astounding way of seeing things and being able to explain ideas in a simple manner that make so much sense and you're left saying to yourself: "Oh, that's how that happened," or "that's why it's like that." At times he can bog you down with details, mainly because he explains them on minutest and seemingly most insignificant level (such as different seeds around the world). And yet you are left with that adage of chaos theory: everything on this planet happens for a reason and has a knock-on effect.

Some of Diamond's ideas that I found and still find most astonishing include:

The reason the continent of Eurasia was able to develop to a much more advanced level than the rest of the world, with its complex empires, cradles of civilizations, and large amount of farming and domesticated species was due to its latitude on a specific east-west axis. The other continents -- North and South America, Africa, Australasia -- are all on a north-south axis. What does this difference mean? For one, climate is greatly changed the further north or south ones goes, which has an effect on the migration of people, animals, and plants, as well as the spread of information, technology and culture. Because of this, Eurasia was able to develop more crops and have them spread around the continent through trade, as well as the spread of domesticated animals, culture and more importantly, technology. The other continents did not have this ease, which Diamond explains in clear detail with facts and dates.

Of course, I am vastly over-simplifying the book and it's really necessary for one to peruse its pages to get the full understanding. Another concept that I was very happy to be made so clear is the explanation of why whites conquered most of the world was not because they were a superior race in any way. And how is this simply explained? To use Jared Diamond's example:

If you liked this review, and would like to read more, go to BookBanter.

I give this book 4 stars because it has some very interesting ideas that provoke thought and inquiry. It also offers plausible explanations that often ring true. I don't give it 5 stars because it suffers from certain drawbacks.

I love his analysis and interpretation of causes that show why civilization arose variously in diverse and distinct locations of the planet. I love how his causes make sense. His rejection of race-based politics is quite clear. I like
how his explanations lead us to reexamine patriotism, nationality, group affiliation, judgment of other cultures... There is definitely a lot to learn and what better way to learn than from someone who loves to learn/teach by
engaging.

Contrary to another reader on goodreads, I couldn't wait to get to the "around the world" chapters. That is what the book was building towards in my opinion. Towards explaining why the world today looks like it does.

Jared Diamond is not much into referencing materials which is strange given that he is an academic. One could claim that this book is written for a wider audience and is meant to be more approachable and if so, Diamond makes some very bald statements which are very hard to substantiate in the absence of citations. For instance, his claim that the hard sciences look down upon softer sciences like history. I heard similar claims in graduate school. But where is the evidence for such claims and should they be taken seriously if there isn't supporting scientific evidence for it? I don't doubt that such evidence may exist if he makes the statement but I have a hard time as a reader who needs more proof. He makes a similar bald assertion towards the front of the book about the prevalence of race-based explanations for differences in development which again I know exist based on similar conversations but which I would never take seriously anyway, unless someone could show it to me using science.

There is a lot of redundancy in the book. The four major causes are drummed, driven and pummeled into one. A different organization of the book could have lead to less redundancy and more salient communication of points. That said, he does still get his points across. Lovely pictures in the book. The maps and tables are a little thin on resources but the author tries to provide a reading list toward the end of the book for each chapter.

The PBS show based on his book more pithily stated and demonstrated the unequal distribution of material wealth, health and resources around the globe and made clear who has benefited and at whose expense. It is not very often that any westerner, let alone an academic has so openly shown through their work how viciously parts of the human race have treated certain other parts of it. His book does make me want to go further back and look also at what lead to racial distinctions in the first place.

In the new edition of the book, there is an especially interesting chapter on Japan and the Japanese people and language and how they might be Korean in ethnicity. This may not go down well with a Japanese audience with their extreme nationalism and their emphasis on superiority over neighboring cultures. However, it is perfectly plausible and a fascinating read.

--
www.aprilandradsdiablog.blogspot.com

My three-star rating has nothing to do with the quality of the ideas in this book; I think they're all top-notch. My lukewarm response has to do instead with their presentation.

Jared Diamond's prose is very readable but prolix. How, one might ask, could I find prolix a book which purports to condense the entire history of humankind into 425 pages? (As Diamond himself points out, compressing 13,000 years of history into roughly 400 pages works out to "an average of about one page per continent per 150 years, making brevity and simplification inevitable" (408). My answer is simply that Diamond does not actually condense 13,000 years of human history into 425 pages but rather picks and chooses which years with which corresponding phenomena on which continents are most relevant to his thesis. In order to prove that "history followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among people's environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves" (25), Diamond traces the domestication of plants and animals, the origins of agriculture, the emergence of crowd diseases such as Bubonic Plague and measles, the rise and spread of techological innovations like metallurgy and writing, and the seemingly autocatalytic process that promotes the development of large complex political entities from small, less complex ones. But "Guns, Germs, and Steel" is not a comprehensive treatment of the Black Death any more than it is a primer for understanding the development of metallurgy. In other words, he skips a lot, which I agree is inevitable; however, my beef is that in addition to skipping a lot, he repeats himself a lot, in effect writing a book that is not so much too long or too short as it is inefficient--prolix.

Diamond states the same ideas over and over again, and he always articulates BOTH the affirmative and the negative formulations, seldom omitting words that really could be ommitted without interfering with itelligibility: "History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among people's environments, NOT because of biological differences among peoples themselves" (25); "the availability of domestic plants and animals ultimately explains why empires, literacy, and steel weapons developed earliest in Eurasia AND later, or not at all, on other continents" (92); "the reason for the failure of Native Americans to domesticate North American apples by the time Europeans arrived lay neither with the people nor with the apples....INSTEAD, the reason Native Americans did not domesticate apples lay with the entire suite of wild plant and animal species available to Native Americans" (156). While I agree that such a writing style is very clear and understandable (readable), surely after the first articulation of each idea and component, bolstering idea, Diamond could speed things up a bit?

But no, in fact, his 18th chapter (the penultimate chapter, not including epilogue, and entitled "Hemispheres Colliding") is an entirely redundant reformulation of ideas previously articulated, often referencing the exact same examples already referenced. This is evidenced by Diamond's tendency to include phrases like "in Chapter 9 we encountered," "as I explained in Chapter 11," and "as we saw in Chapters 5 and 10..." This, along with his tendency to provide overview (as in the Prologue: "Part 4...applies the lessons of Parts 2 and 3") as well as suggestions like "if we begin by comparing Figure 19.2 with Figure 19.1..." that contribute to the unfortunate impression on the part of the reader that he/she is reading the incomplete novelization of a textbook--a hitherto unknown literary hybrid.

This is not to say that Diamond has not ultimately provided a service to humanity by writing "Guns, Germs, and Steel" or that his arguments are unconvincing or that he never provides us with an arresting phrase or that the book is devoid of colorful and illustrative anecdotes. The very basis for the book rests in a personal experience of Diamond's in New Guinea in 1972 ("Yali's Question"); and I especially like the phraseology of the final sentence of Chapter 19, "...the different historical trajectories of Africa and Europe stem ultimately from differences in real estate." And one certainly cannot fail to be struck by the originality of some of his ideas, such as the orientation of the continents' major axes (East-West vs. North-South) having played a greater role in the differences between human societies than we have previously recognized. Overall, this book is very accomplished and worth reading.

However, Diamond gradually chips away at the various misconceptions, errors, and prejudgments that cloud our understanding of human prehistory and history in the manner of a slow-moving stream or a very patient archaeologist. Maybe he imagines that this gradual approach is necessary for changing slow-moving or simply out-of-touch minds in which repetition might accomplish what erudition might not, though I really can't imagine such individuals, let alone the genuine racists whose views Diamond is avowedly rebutting making it through the book. But really (to borrow a page out of Diamond's intellectual repertoire), I believe this book could be intellectually stronger, aesthetically superior, and ultimately more influential if Diamond repeated himself less while articulating more.

Γιατί κάποιοι λαοί επικράτησαν ,έναντι κάποιων άλλων; Γιατί κάποιες κοινωνίες εξελίχτηκαν περισσότερο; Οι απαντήσεις σε αφήνουν άφωνο. Ίσως μια καλή πρόταση σωφρονισμού ,για όσους κατηγορούνται για ρατσιστικά εγκλήματα , είναι να καλούνται να διαβάσουν αυτό το βιβλίο ! Τα πληρέστερα επιχειρήματα , έναντι κάθε ρατσιστικής διάθεσης. Ένας πραγματικός θησαυρός γνώσεων.

Very interesting and thought provoking history book. nice laid out and logical theories on the evolution of empires and conquest. Very recommended

The Purist

I give you now Professor Twist,
A conscientious scientist,
Trustees exclaimed, "He never bungles!"
And sent him off to distant jungles.
Camped on a tropic riverside,
One day he missed his loving bride.
She had, the guide informed him later,
Been eaten by an alligator.
Professor Twist could not but smile.
"You mean," he said, "a crocodile."

That bit of Ogden Nash whimsy came into my head as I thought about Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, a reflection on human history through the lens of evolutionary biology. Diamond, unlike Professor Twist, is seeking answers to real world problems. In this case, he seeks to understand the plight of indigenous peoples and their subordination to European and Asian cultures in light of evolutionary pressures. Even so, Diamond seems awkward in his attempts to justify the ways of the Blind Watchmaker to men as so. One false note comes early in the book, when he departs from his evenhandedness to assure us that not only should we not hold New Guineans to be less intellectually endowed than Europeans (a reasonable enough assumption), but that they are probably intellectually superior. He admits that he can't demonstrate that superiority empirically, so that assertion strikes the reader as an attempt to curry favor by a politically correct reverse bias.

On the other hand, there's a lot of really stimulating and interesting stuff in this book. Diamond talks about: what kinds of foodstuffs are necessary to support civilization; why disease almost always flowed from native Europeans to native Americans (and not vice-versa), whereas Europeans encounter many new diseases when they attempted to enter Africa; why those previous two topics are related; how innovation happens; etc. It seems like there's an interesting fact or point of view whenever you turn the page.

The book seeks a complete explanation for the course of human history. It has that sort of broad, sweeping intellectual appeal that a hefty work of philosophy or science has. For example, after someone learns Newtonian mechanics, he tends to see the entire universe as the interplay between physical forces that are expressed in terms of differential equations. A similar dynamic happens here, where the reader suddenly sees commonplaces in a new light.

As with most grand theories, it's important to see that there are some important limits to the analysis. While we can see why, in broad strokes, European and Asian peoples might have overwhelming advantages in human history in purely biological and geographical terms, Diamond's analysis is of no help in answering historical questions that still might strike us as large, but come within the realm of European or Asian culture, instead of at the border with other peoples. For example, it's hard to see how his analysis adds anything to our understand of conflicts such as the Greco-Persian wars, the rise and decline of Rome, the Napoleonic Wars, or the American Civil War. Certainly these questions are important, and we rightly inquire into agricultural, military, political, and culture causes for these events. In these cases Diamond's analysis is largely impossible, since we are dealing with peoples that share genetics, foodstuffs, climates, terrains, etc.

Perhaps I'm nit-picking. It's an excellent, thought-provoking book. I'd just like to temper the inevitable temptation to view all history through this lens.

هذه ليست مراجعة كاملة، وإنما هي رد كتبته على قراءة الأخ خالد المغربي، وقد طلب الأخ الكريم بلطفه نقل الرد ليكون بمثابة مراجعة للكتاب، وها أنا أفعل رغم قناعتي أنه سيكون مراجعة عرجاء وناقصة كثيرا ً.



قرأت هذا الكتاب العام الماضي، ولانشغالي حينها لم أكتب عنه للأسف، رغم قيمته الكبيرة وأهميته.

يخبرنا مؤلف الكتاب جارد دايموند كيف جاءته فكرة الكتاب خلال محادثة له مع أحد سكان نيو غينيا الأصليين، الذي سأل دايموند لماذا لديكم أيها الغربيون الكثير من الشحنات – Cargos جمع شحنة، وهي الكلمة التي استخدمها الرجل ليعني بها لمَ لديكم كل هذه المخترعات؟ – وليس لدينا نحن مثلها، هذا السؤال لم يجب عليه دايموند حينها ولكنه شغله لسنوات طويلة تالية وكان هذا الكتاب الذي تحول أيضاً إلى فيلم وثائقي ممتع قدمه المؤلف نفسه.

الجواب الذي قدمه دايموند يلخصه عنوان الكتاب (أسلحة، جراثيم وفولاذ)، حيث يخبرنا دايموند أولاً باللقاء الشهير بين كورتيز وموكتيزوما إمبراطور الأزتيك وكيف استطاع رجل وبضعة جنود القضاء على إمبراطورية كاملة، ويتخذ من هذه الحادثة التاريخية مدخلاً، ليشرح لمَ كان هناك فارق تقني هائل ما بين الغربيين والأزتيك، شارحا ً عوامل تطور الحضارات، من البيئة النباتية والحيوانية التي تنشأ فيها، وكيف تصنع هذه البيئة فروقات كبيرة على مدى طويل من أعمار الحضارات، وكيف أن تعايش الحضارات وتقاربها يمنحها الفرصة للاستفادة من بعضها، بينما عزلة بعضها يجعلها منكمشة، كما يشرح بعد ذلك أهمية ودور الأسلحة والحديد كأدوات للإنسان، ودور الجراثيم وكيف كان الأوربيون محصنين ضدها لأنهم كونوا مناعة، بينما قضت على السكان الأصليين بشكل مفجع، بحيث مات ملايين البشر بسبب أوبئة وأمراض جاءت مع الأوربيين.

الكتاب متين ومهم جدا ً، وإن كان دايموند استفرغ جهده في شرح لمَ كانت حضارات العالم القديم متفوقة على حضارات العالم الجديد – أمريكا وأستراليا -، وأظن أنه يحتاج إلى عمر ثانٍ وكتاب ثانٍ ليشرح لما تفوق الأوربيون كحضارة على بقية حضارات العالم القديم، وهو ما عالجه في هذا الكتاب بشكل مقتضب وسريع.

I picked up this book based on the rave reviews of others. It is one of the very few books I put down before finishing. I found the author had the habit of making suppositions and a few pages later quoting them as facts.

Jared sticks to the basic premise and plugs every hole in his argument so well to construct a magnificent explanation of the evolution of societies. What makes the book particularly good is the intimate hands-on experience that Jared has on the wide variety of fields required to attempt a book like this.

The last four or five chapters start to get very repetitive, but except for that Diamond has taken a stunningly large scale view of history that keeps you enthralled throughout the 13,000 years we cover in this book.