Guns, Germs, and Steel

I have heard many and mixed review of this book, from the former AP student, who groans at its mention, to my father, who has trouble keeping it "in stock" at our house because he is continually gifting it to friends and acquaintances. I now hear my classmates' languishings with some sympathy. Yes, it is a long book, and yes, it could be a third shorter shy the repetitions and reiterations, but it is also a beautiful, evolving masterwork.

In form it is almost 19th-century [1], and the painfully exacting logic which leaves no equid unturned was galling at first, but I began to appreciate it as I took in the vast scope and depth of Diamond's imparted knowledge. Guns, Germs, and Steel is a highly relevant multidisciplinary analysis of our planet: its geography, its inhabitants, and the massively complex underlying movements that got today's societies where we are today. That Diamond was able to make his research, which spans such various fields as biology, sociology, epidemiology, archaeology, and linguistics, at all accessible to the layperson is remarkable.

It saddens me that this book has received criticism for being racist. Diamond has been accused of prescribing racial deficiencies, for example, when he says that Native Americans "failed" to domesticate a local species of apple. This is preposterous. In Diamond's own words, "The objection to such racist explanations is not just that they are loathsome, but also that they are wrong." His theory of socioeconomic evolution is not only comparative, but comprehensive. He stresses again and again that, had disparate populations of humans been interchanged in prehistory, or local geographic and ecological conditions been different, Montezuma could very well have sent conquerors to Spain and brutally dethroned King Charles I, instead of the other way around.

In fact, it is the specificity of these contentious illustrative examples which makes Guns, Germs, and Steel so interesting and valuable. The sections which absorbed me the most were always the stories of real people and peoples, some of whom my Euro-centric upbringing had not even seen fit to mention. This book is very scientific, almost mathematical, in nature, but it was conceived and driven by a passion for human understanding. It shows the tribes and nations and races of our world not as alien curiosities, but as the cultural and material sums of millions of years of interaction with their environments. I believe that it is at least as significant, if not more so, for this image, as it is for its charts of cereals and carbon dates.


[1] On the Origin of Species could have been a pamphlet.