Diamond acknowledges that no single person can be an authority in all these fields, yet he mentions most of the other scholars who must have informed his ideas not in the text but only in an addendum. Its sheer depth compels him to wear the hats of anthropologist, archeologist, plant geneticist, epidemiologist and social, military and technological historian, as well as his own academic headgear. His multilayered analysis, however, should be consumed with a grain or two of salt. Diamond peels away the causes beneath the causes of other European cultural advantages, as if the humanized world were a gigantic onion and recorded history only its blighted surface. Diamond cleverly finesses the biological determinists with another tale of annihilation of one society at the hands of another.
Before analyzing the deeper (and ultimately accidental) causes behind European domination, Mr. However, far more important than those quibbles-and actually far more important than the author's erudition-is Diamond's intellectual honesty. There is a useful bibliographic essay at the end, but in a work with this heft it would have been nice to see footnotes or endnotes. Guns, Germs, and Steel is not without faults, although these are minor. This synopsis, unfortunately, doesn't do credit to the immense subtlety of this book, which includes long sections about the use of linguistics to reach conclusions about ancient societies, employs knowledge gained from molecular biology and animal behavior to elucidate events otherwise lost to history, and recounts numerous mysteries about the course of human settlement. That its insights seem so fresh, its facts so novel and arresting, is evidence of how little Americans-and, I suspect, most well-educated citizens of the Western world-know of the most important forces of human history.
The main argument, in simplified form, should be taught as early as grammar school. uns, Germs, and Steel is a volume no one should leave college without reading.
fascinating and extremely important book.
0 kommentar(er)
