m.migalina

Book Review of Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel”

Book 'Guns, Germs, and Steel' by Jared Diamond

“Guns, Germs, and Steel” is truly a fundamental book that one should read to enlarge one’s vision.

You will not get a CLEAR picture of everything; that’s simply not possible taking into account the amount of information, countless angles, and scales for the same event.

However, what a passionate anthropologist, Jared Diamond, offers here is a vast framework for understanding how was the world shaped as modern humans know it. “Guns, Germs, and Steel” is a zoom out of the time and space to provide you with the widest possible view of what has been happening and is still happening on Earth for the past 200,000 years.

In one book, Jared Diamond manages to fit in and share his knowledge of history, anthropology, biology with genetics, geography and social sciences.

Using a plain language, the author extracts the juice from the global events to deliver the answers to the questions on why things went this way and not another, why did Europeans conquered Americas and not the other way around, to which extent some peoples were given an advantage contributing to a faster development and evolution compared to other ones.

Why didn’t capitalism flourish in Native Mexico, mercantilism in sub-Saharan Africa, scientific inquiry in China, advanced technology in Native North America, and nasty germs in Aboriginal Australia?

Why weren’t Native Americans, Africans, and Aboriginal Australians the ones who decimated, subjugated, or exterminated Europeans and Asians?

For me, the sign that this work did influence my thinking, my whole being, was that feeling of childish excitement of discovery; it incited flow of thoughts and questions, inner dialogue and sometimes dispute with the author.

Posted by m.migalina in Books, 0 comments
Russia (14.08. – 22.08.2018)

Russia (14.08. – 22.08.2018)

Moscow

I´ve spent 2 years in Moscow (2008-2010) when studying at the university and before moving to Europe. Needless to say, a lot has changed since that time in Russia but especially in Moscow.

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Posted by m.migalina in Travel, 0 comments

Carnival

Last week, Rhineland region celebrated a carnival, and today I want to tell you some things I know about this interesting German and not only German event.

Disclaimer: My knowledge of German and other carnival traditions is far from being complete and mostly related to my personal experience: I’ve seen and heard something here and there.

February-March is the season of carnivals all over the world. It seems to me that almost every country has it in one form or another. At the same time, carnivals are so diverse from one place to another, that two nearby cities can have totally different traditions for the carnival.

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Posted by m.migalina in Culture and Mentality, 0 comments